Art + Architecture + Design
Top 10 Architects who are not Architects
Got this email this morning; ‘Arthur Erickson…Canada’s most famous architect and the first to put Canadian architecture on the world map.’ is no longer allowed to call himself an architect because he will not take the 18 required hours of continuing ed. every year to certify him as such. Hilarious, if it wasn’t so absurd and it made me think of all the influential ‘architects’ in modern history who had no formal architectural training. Here is my first-pass at a top ten list. I’m sure I missed many more so shout-out your favorite non-architects and we’ll get a top 100 list going…
1. Tadao Ando, Japan
2. Charles Eames, United States
3. Buckminster Fuller, United States
4. Carlo Scarpa, Italy
5. Luis Barragan, Mexico
6. Bruce Goff, United States
7. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Great Brittan
8. William Morris, Great Brittan
9. Gerrit Th. Rietveld, The Netherlands
10. Mary Jane Colter, United States
Of course, this list could go the other way too, as in the ‘Top 10 Architects who became Something Else…’ Beginning with Sergei M. Eisenstein and moving on from there…
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Absolutely right about Eames; studied it, briefly, practiced it, and his Case Study house remains an icon of modernism.
But if I’m not mistaken, he never received a degree in it. In fact, according to the NYT [12/7/89] “Schooled for only two years at the Washington University School of Architecture in St. Louis, Eames still called himself an architect, to suggest the totality of his outlook. ”We consider it all architecture,” he was quoted as saying by Ralph Caplan, a columnist for Industrial Design magazine and a symposium speaker. Design is ”a plan for arranging elements,” ”a method of action” Eames said in the 1972 film ”Design Q & A,” also shown at the symposium.”
So he fits our list perfectly. In fact, if he was practicing in Canada, he would likely not be allowed to call himself an ‘architect’ due to his failure to take continuing ed. coursework. Pure speculation, of course, but I think probable.
Didn’t Charles Eames study architecture at Cranbrook and later head the Cranbrook architecture and urban planning department?
True about Barragan and Tadao and in fact many of my short-listers did some informal/apprentice work before they began their practice, so my list could certainly be longer. [I left FLW and Corbu off because, well they are legends to me, which come to think of it is probably what this whole thing is about] The idea that a professional needs to jump through certain hoops—particularly anachronistic hoops like interning and continuing education classes—just strikes me as absurd. It smacks of the old guard trying to hang on to outdated ideas about what it takes to be ‘an architect’. Come to think of it, that would make an interesting discussion in and of itself…
It is about time someone did a post like this, but what is your criteria for defining an architect? Because you could easily included FLW or Le Corbusier to that list. At least Barragan had informal training as an apprentice, as did Tadao who also started architecture school