Guess the Architect: Past Winners
View past winners from RECORD's Guess the Architect contest.
April 2020
Clue: The successful designer of furnishings and objects crafted this beach house with a close friend and architect, although it is largely attributed to her. Another architect, a friend, later painted murals inside, against the wishes of the designer.
Photo © Manuel Bougot
March 2020
Clue: Because of its South Pacific location, this cultural center is one of the most admired but little visited works by a contemporary well-known architect. The cluster of 10 huts represents a vernacular structural solution to its hot and humid climate by the use of passive cooling through ventilation and shading.
Answer: The architect for the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre near Nouméa, New Caledonia, is Renzo Piano Building Workshop (1998). The series of ten pavilions is admired for its use of vernacular forms and passive cooling and shading strategies in a hot climate.
Photo © Wiki Commons user Joozly
February 2020
Clue: The architect for this “state asylum for the insane” designed the facility according to a therapeutic plan that emphasized light, air, and views. The rambling complex featured the architect’s well-known use of rusticated sandstone and romanesque revival features. it received a new life in an imaginative conversion to a hotel and conference center.
Answer: The architect for the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane is Henry Hobson Richardson, who designed the sandstone complex with Romanesque Revival features in 1881. The asylum, now a National Historic Landmark, has since been converted into the Richardson Olmsted Campus, in which one part, the Hotel Henry, was renovated by Deborah Berke Partners in December 2016.
Photo © Christopher Payne
January 2020
CLUE: This modernist architect was famous for his manipulation of brick to create taut, volumetric forms. Trained as a civil engineer, he became the city architect for a growing town where he designed municipal buildings, garden villages, and 17 schools, of which this was considered particularly distinctive.
Answer: The architect for the Dr. Bavinck School at Bosdrift in Hilversum, the Netherlands, was Willem Dudok, who designed the Modernist work in 1922. As the director of public works and then Hilversum’s municipal architect, Dudok notably constructed the town hall and 17 schools. His articulation of brick to emphasize a strong interplay of vertical and horizontal forms evokes Cubist and de Stijl motifs and gives his work a human scale.
WINNER: Jookun Lim, principal, JLIM Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Photo © Therese Bonney
December 2019
CLUE: The architect for this small museum in New York had codesigned the first building for the Museum of Modern Art of 1939. The ardent modernist's later work became more decorative. This building's famous lollipop columns were partially concealed in a controversial 2008 redesign that reclad the freestanding structure.
ANSWER: The architect for Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle in New York was Edward Durell Stone. When the building opened in 1964, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in The New York Times that it was a “die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops.” Ironically, a number of preservationists later fought to keep the Stone version intact when Allied Works completely remodeled it for the Museum of Art and Design in 2008.
Photo © Ezra Stoller/Esto
November 2019
CLUE: A small arts center on a university campus is the sole example in the U.S. of the work of an influential pioneering modern architect. In spite of the fact that most of the architect's work has to be seen abroad, he attracted a strong following in academic and professional circles in this country.
ANSWER: The architect for the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University is Le Corbusier. Completed in 1963 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the five-level poured-in-place-concrete building relies on a sculptural ramp as the chief circulation device, which emphasizes the processional quality Le Corbusier sought in his work.
WINNER: Erin McCullough, project manager, Archimages, Inc., St. Louis, Missouri
Photo © B. O'Kane / Alamy
October 2019
CLUE: The architect for this twin tower Art Deco apartment building started off as a draftsman in Burnham and Root's Chicago office when it was designing the world's Columbian Exposition of 1893. While his post-World War I residential towers met with acclaim, his commercial buildings built after WWII were much more mundane.
ANSWER: The architect for the Eldorado apartment building on Central Park West in Manhattan was Emery Roth (in association with Margon & Holder). Roth completed the steel-frame Art Deco–style 30-story building in 1931 just after the San Remo (1929) and the Beresford (1929), both also on Central Park West. All have become residential landmarks, admired for their spires, details, and ornament.
WINNER: Phillip E. Kinsel, enterprise architect, OCB Architects, Burton, Michigan.
Photo © Hu Totya / Wikimedia Commons
September 2019
CLUE: The partner of a well-known firm is credited with the opulent design of this Italian Renaissance-style private library and study for a prominent banker and book collector. The main room in the Palazzo-like structure features three tiers of trim book stacks, accessible by two spiral stairs in the corners.
ANSWER: The architect for the first portion of New York’s Morgan Library and Museum was Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White, who completed the Renaissance-style library for J. Pierpont Morgan in 1906. The 30-foot-high room contains three tiers of book stacks along with an ornamented coved ceiling.
WINNER: Adam Welker, project manager, Douglas C. Wright Architect, New York City
Photo © Graham Haber
August 2019
CLUE: An architectural firm designed a visitors center in an urban park to blend intricately with the landscape. The roof—partly sawtooth and copper clad, the curved part covered in grass—melds with an existing Earth berm and an allée of Gingko trees for an arresting fusion of nature and building.
ANSWER: The Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, designed by New York firm Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, opened in 2012. The melding of structure and site is achieved with a sawtooth copper-clad roof that gives way to a curved grass roof to create a pavilion for ticket booths, café, and exhibition space.
WINNER: Dean Neuenswander, senior project architect, Perkins & Will, Dallas, Texas
Photo © Albert Vecerka/Esto
July 2019
CLUE: This airport was designed by an architect known to create distinct designs for each commission at a time when a Miesian universal solution was deemed to be more functional. The swooping, upwardly turned profile of the cable-supported concrete roof aptly embodied the idea of a gateway building and embraced the idea of flight.
ANSWER: The Washington Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, was designed by Eero Saarinen and opened in 1962. Saarinen, whose TWA Terminal at Idlewild (now JFK) opened the same year, captured in both schemes the grandeur of flight through exploiting the sculptural and technical qualities of concrete.
Photo © Joe Ravi
June 2019
CLUE: A mixed-use complex featuring two cylindrical apartment towers was designed by an American-born architect who studied at the Bauhaus in Berlin with Mies Van Der Rohe. The apartments' scalloped balconies and wedge-shaped rooms seemed especially surprising in view of his early training in rationalist, rectilinear planning.
ANSWER: The mixed-use complex of Marina City in Chicago, marked by two cylindrical apartment towers, was designed by Bertrand Goldberg and opened in 1963. The corncob-like forms include apartments with pie-shaped rooms over a spiraling parking garage. The design seems a far cry from the schooling American-born Goldberg had when he traveled to Berlin in 1932 to work with Mies van der Rohe, then director of the Bauhaus in its third and final venue.
WINNER: Marcy Goodwin, president, M. Goodwin Museum Planning, Inc., Albuquerque, New Mexico
Photo © 2Candle at English Wikipedia
May 2019
CLUE: In 1930, a department store designed by an innovative architect became well known for its sleekly curved facade, with horizontal bands of windows, enclosing a concrete column-and-beam structure. Its recent conversion to an archeological museum included a sensitive renovation.
ANSWER: The former Schocken department store in Chemnitz, Germany, was designed by Erich Mendelsohn, a Berlin-based architect known for his Expressionist Eisenstein Tower (1921) in Potsdam, Germany. The store, one of several Mendelsohn designed for the Schocken company, maintains its original streamlined aura with a sensitive recent conversion into the State Museum of Archeology Chemnitz.
WINNER: Paul D. Adem, AIA, La Canada Flintridge, California
Photo © Altsachse / Wikimedia Commons
April 2019
CLUE: Soon after this architect founded an influential school, he and a colleague designed a house for a university professor nearby that reflected his curriculum's Modernist ideals. The still extant residence arrestingly features those principles—including a flat roof, cubic massing, and white-plastered taut planes.
ANSWER: The Auerbach House in Jena, Germany, was designed by Walter Gropius with Adolf Meyer in 1924, when Gropius was the director of the Bauhaus in Weimar (which soon moved to Dessau). With its distinctive cubiform volumes, asymmetrical plan, and flat roof, the villa represented an early example of the school's architectural principles, and continues to serve as a private residence in this university town.
WINNER: James Boley, architect, TransForm Architecture & Design, Chicago, Illinois
Photo © Candy Welz
March 2019
CLUE: A 1932 civic center, distinguished by a Spanish Renaissance-style tower, was expanded in the late 1980's by an architect known for working within a playful, historicist vocabulary. When finished, the addition was criticized by some for being too fantasylike; others considered it perfect for its particular location.
ANSWER: The architect for the Beverly Hills Civic Center is Charles Moore, along with his Los Angeles office, Urban Innovations Group. Completed in 1990, the complex, heralded by a 1932 Spanish Renaissance tower, employs a typically “Moorish” Postmodern approach that fancifully mixes Art Deco and Spanish motifs.
WINNER: Gordon Scholz, professor and director of the Community and Regional Planning Program, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska
Photo © John O'Neill
February 2019
CLUE: The architect was well-known for his renovations of stately structures in a Neoclassical style, which he developed from ancient and renaissance sources. His work demonstrated the skillful use of decoration to dramatize interior spaces, such as the long hall of a 16th-century country house.
ANSWER: In 1762, Scottish architect Robert Adam renovated Syon House, in west London. Built in the 16th century, the house needed upgrading. Adam’s interiors, such as the Long Gallery, proved to be influential in promulgating an aesthetic drawing on the architecture and decorative arts of Pompei and Roman antiquity as well as the Gothic and Baroque periods.
Photo © Diamond Geezer
January 2019
CLUE: The architect and director of an arts and crafts school designed two studio buildings expressive of his proto-modern vernacular vision. The school's name later changed when another architect took over, transformed the program, relocated the school to another city, and created radically modern structures for it.
ANSWER: In the early 20th century, the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde came to Weimar Germany to run the School of Arts and Crafts and design two of its buildings, in 1904 and 1911. World War I caused its temporary closing, but by 1919 Walter Gropius had arrived as its head and changed its name to the Bauhaus. Later, Gropius moved the Bauhaus to Dessau, where he designed new facilities emblematic of the institution’s modernist beliefs. Ironically, Van de Velde’s own school in Weimar still functions today as the Bauhaus University.
Photo © Albertine Slotboom
December 2018
CLUE: An architectural firm known for its vanguard theories as well as design illustrated its approach in a 1970's expansion to a Renaissance Revival-style museum. The novel solution kept the scale, proportions, and delicacy of the older building while relying on modernist volumes, fenestration, and floor plans.
ANSWER: The architect for the expansion of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio is Venturi Scott Brown and Associates (now VSBA). In 1976, the Philadelphia firm added new wings to Cass Gilbert’s 1917 Renaissance Revival building. They created rectilinear modern structures incorporating simple historical motifs—a “decorated shed.”
Photo © Tom Bernard
November 2018
CLUE: The architect for this university building left an indelible stamp on the campus of his alma mater through the consummate expression of a collegiate gothic style. The vertical and horizontal massing of this particular example, with ample stone carving and leaded windows, assured its enduring position as a landmark.
ANSWER: The architect for the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University shown in the November issue is James Gamble Rogers. After studying at Yale, he trained in architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Subsequently, he completed a number of buildings for his New England alma mater in the Collegiate Gothic style, including the library, which opened in 1930.
Photo © Michael Marsland
October 2018
CLUE: A world-renowned architect designed this ensemble of steel and glass rowhouses and high-rise apartment buildings with retail space, a school, and an ample park on the edge of the downtown of a major American city. The complex became an influential housing model for modernist design, even when the city itself suffered economically.
ANSWER: The architect for Lafayette Park in Detroit in the October issue’s contest was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who completed the urban redevelopment project in 1959. The mix of townhouses and court houses with high-rise apartment buildings, plus a school, retail space, and a park on its 46 acres, helped guarantee its success.
WINNER: Ruth Gless, FAIA, managing principal, Lincoln Street Studio, Columbus, Ohio
Photo © Michelle and Chris Gerard
September 2018
CLUE: The still unfinished landmark is by an architect famous for his technical and stylistic innovations. This church, both gothic and expressionist in spirit, features inclined piers and hyberbolic paraboloid vaults that attest to the designer's structural ingenuity.
ANSWER: The architect for the September issue contest’s Sagrada Família Basilica in Barcelona was Antoni Gaudí, who started working on its Gothic-organic design in 1915. By his death in 1926, only part of the church was completed. Over the last century, others have tried to finish the task, with completion expected in 2026, the centenary of Gaudí’s death.
WINNER: Robert Mehall , president, Robert Mehall/ARCHITECT, Snowmass Village, Colorado
Photo © Rafael Vargas
August 2018
CLUE: The designer of this seemingly tranquil mise-en-scène—known for his architecture, interiors, and furniture—developed a reputation as the "father of modern gardening." His treatment of outdoor spaces as a series of natural rooms, dramatized by temples, made his landscape distinct.
ANSWER: The architect and landscape designer for the August issue’s classical Temple of Ancient Virtue and the pastoral Elysian Fields in England is the multidisciplinary talent William Kent, who began work on the grounds of Stowe, an existing manor, in the 1730s. Kent, later called the “father of modern gardening,” brought a free manner to the pastoral setting.
WINNER: Allison Tunick, landscape designer, JET Architects, Bangor, Maine
Photo © Jo Turner
July 2018
CLUE: The designer of this 16th-century office complex, now a museum, is better known for an influential book recounting the biographies of important artists and architects of the period. The work helped identify the historical importance of this setting and the achievements of its protagonists.
ANSWER: The architect for the July issue’s contest is Giorgio Vasari. The 16th-century Tuscan architect designed the Uffizi Gallery for Florentine ruler Cosimo I de’ Medici between 1559 and 1581. He is best known as the author of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550), an influential work of biography that was the first of its kind.
WINNER: Christine Ussler, architect /owner, Artefact, Inc. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Photo © Cezar Suceveanu
June 2018
CLUE: The architect's distinctive apartment building was featured in Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture as an example of the principle of ambiguity. The author wondered "are they one building with a split or two buildings joined?"
ANSWER: The architect for the June issue’s contest is Luigi Moretti. The Italian architect completed the apartment building in Rome, Il Girasole, in 1950. Renewed attention came to the residential work after Robert Venturi showed interest in the ambiguity of its split facade in his influential book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966.
WINNER: Paul Scoville, Paul Scoville Archiect, Albany, New York.
Photo © Gabriele Basilico / Archivio Gabriele Basilico, Milano
May 2018
CLUE: This prefabricated modern house—made of a steel frame and modular wall panels of metal and glass—by a multidisciplinary design partnership demonstrated how military technology could be adapted for modern housing.
ANSWER: Eames in partnership with designer Ray Eames. Their own house, or Case Study House #8 (1945–49), examines how technology and prefabricated materials developed in wartime could influence residential design and construction.
WINNER: Charles Blomberg, partner, Rafael Viñoly Architect, New York
Photo © Edward Stojakovic
April 2018
CLUE: This 150-square-foot shop became its architect's first acclaimed building. The store, notable for its sleek use of aluminum inside and out, is considered an early postmodernist work due to its entrance's playful resemblance to a classical column.
ANSWER: The architect for the April issue’s contest is Austria-born HANS HOLLEIN, the 1985 Pritzker Prize laureate. The Retti Candle Shop, completed in 1966, won him recognition for his playful use of aluminum and mirrors along with the entrance’s allusion to a classical column.
WINNER: Stephen Schreiber FAIA, architect and professor, Amherst, MA
Photo © Thomas Ledl
March 2018
CLUE: Three young architects, influenced by Le Corbusier's brutalism and Louis Kahn's compositional rigor, designed this municipal building. A structural system of poured-concrete columns and cores, and precast-concrete vierendeel trusses set it apart from the city's redbrick surroundings.
ANSWER: The architects for the March issue’s contest are GERHARD KALLMANN, NOEL MCKINNELL, and EDWARD KNOWLES. In 1962, the trio won a design competition for Boston’s new City Hall. The building opened in 1969 to acclaim from the architectural community, although some of the public called it “perplexing.”
WINNER: Manushi Ashok Jain , architectural designer, Labo Design Studio, New York City
Photo © Boston Redevelopment Authority Photographs, Collection City of Boston Archives
February 2018
CLUE: A firm of four architects designed the 26-story office and apartment tower in response to the plain, functionalist, modernist buildings challenging the traditional cityscape. The shape of the poured-concrete skyscraper, with its allusion to medieval fortresses, anticipated postmodernist architecture.
ANSWER: The architect for the February issue’s contest is the firm BBPR (GIAN LUIGI BANFI, LUDOVICO BELGIOJOSO, ENRICO PERESSUTTI, and ERNESTO NATHAN ROGERS). The Torre Velasca, a 26-story office and apartment tower in Milan, was completed in 1958. The Modern skyscraper’s historical references were later recognized as anticipating Postmodernism.
WINNER: Tiina Reiter, product engineer, Yadros International, Naples, Florida
Photo © CEphoto, UWE Aranas/CC-By-SA-3.0
January 2018
CLUE: This middle school offers an alternative to the modern classroom: The architect organized eight distinct volumes of poured concrete along a central spine topped by light monitors. The surreal outdoor sculpture by Pierino Selmoni was added later, in 1979.
ANSWER: The architect for the January issue’s contest is MARIO BOTTA. His middle school in Morbio Inferiore, a town in Ticino, Switzerland, close to the Italian border, was completed in 1977. Botta’s rigorous scheme contains classrooms in eight poured-concrete volumetric units topped by light monitors, and dramatized by a playful sculpture of a half-buried giant by Pierino Selmoni.
WINNER: Sam North, intern architect, LRS Architects, Portland, Maine
Photo © Francesco Piraneo G./Wikimedia Commons
December 2017
CLUE: When a government building was converted into a museum, an ovoidal concrete structure was added by the same acclaimed architect who had designed the original edifice decades earlier. The museum now bears the architect's name.
ANSWER: The architect for the December issue’s contest is OSCAR NIEMEYER, the Brazilian visionary known for his curving béton brut forms. He designed the eye-like concrete annex in the early 2000s for his Presidente Humberto Castelo Branco Building, completed in 1978. The complex is now called the Museu Oscar Niemeyer.
WINNER: Carlos Fornos, designer, Mancini Duffy, New York City
Photo © Beth Castelo / Flickr
November 2017
CLUE: This residential complex, initially designed for an undergraduate thesis, ended up being commissioned for a world’s fair pavilion. The highly published stacked arrangement of 354 identical, prefabricated concrete units helped launch the career of the now internationally known architect.
ANSWER: The architect for the November issue’s contest is WALTER ANDREW NETSCH JR., a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill when the firm was hired in the 1950s to design a new U.S. Air Force academy in Colorado Springs. His tetrahedral Cadet Chapel, with its aluminum and stained-glass cladding, opened in 1963 and quickly became the campus highlight.
WINNER: Steven Singer, architect, BKV Group, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Photo © Carol M. Highsmith/America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
October 2017
CLUE: The residential complex, initially designed as a master's thesis, ended up being commissioned for a world's fair pavilion. The highly published stacked arrangement of 354 identical, prefabricated concrete units helped launch the career of the now internationally known architect.
ANSWER: The architect for the October issue’s contest is Israeli-Canadian MOSHE SAFDIE, who designed the housing complex Habitat for Expo 67 in Montreal. Safdie’s undergraduate-thesis-turnedpavilion was his first built project and launched an illustrious career, though Habitat remains his most widely recognized work.
WINNER: Patrick Leroy, project architect, The Jones Payne Group, San Diego, California
Photo © Matias Garabed / Wikimedia Commons
September 2017
CLUE: A pair of architects and designers renovated a château for the wife of a future emperor in what became known as the Empire style. She advanced their notions by having her bedroom fitted out with a tented ceiling and ornate canopied bed.
ANSWER: The architects and designers for the September issue’s contest are Charles Percier and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, who renovated the Château de Malmaison for Napoléon and Joséphine Bonaparte in 1799 in what is known as the Empire style. In 1805, architect, decorator, and landscape designer Louis-Martin Berthault created a tentlike setting for Joséphine’s bedroom as a backdrop for the gilt, canopied bed from the furniture maker Jacob-Desmalter and Company.
WINNER: Lisa St. Amand, design technician, JCJ Architecture, Hartford, Connecticut
Photo © Deagostini/Getty Images
August 2017
CLUE: The self-taught landscape architect was the only female to become a founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects. She designed the residential garden for her aunt, a famous novelist, and completedd some 200 gardens for private and public clients.
ANSWER: The architect for the August issue’s contest is landscape designer Beatrix Ferrand, who designed the entrance drive and vegetable garden for her aunt Edith Wharton at the Mount, in the Berkshires, in the early 1900s and helped her with the formal gardens. Ferrand soon launched a distinguished career, of which Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. (1922–40), remains her best-known work.
WINNER: Brian Dove, architect, Fitzgerald Associates Architects, Chicago, Illinois
Photo © John Seakwood
July 2017
CLUE: The obelisk dedicated to George Washington on the mall of the nation's capital is 555 feet tall, the highest freestanding stone structure in the world. It was designed in 1848 but not completed for 40 years—long after the death of its architect, famous for a number of government buildings, churches, and other institutions in this country.
ANSWER: The architect for the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., is Robert Mills. While he designed the marble, granite, and bluestone gneiss obelisk, the world's tallest stone structure (555 feet, 5/8 inch) in 1848, he died in 1855, and it wasn't finished until 30 years later.
WINNER: Francisco Villela, project manager, Marcatects, San Diego, California
Photo © Library of Congress
June 2017
CLUE: With a background in painting and print-making, this self-taught archiect designed his own distinctive house for an experimental art colony. The fluid lines and spaces of the architecture and interiors established a Gesamtkunstwerk that included furnishings, light fittings, and tableware. Soon after, he founded an atelier specializing in architecture and graphic and industrial design, which attracted a young group of soon-to-be influential modernists.
ANSWER: The architect for the house in the June issue is PETER BEHRENS, who designed the cottage for himself in 1901 as part of an artists’ colony in Darmstadt, Germany. Behrens, who was self-taught, exploited his graphic sense to give his dwelling an unusual linear quality. This, along with his design of all aspects of the interiors, resulted in a striking work.
WINNER: Steve Arnaudin, principal, Steve Arnaudin Architect, Brevard, North Carolina
Photo © Wikipedia Commons
May 2017
CLUE: The 792-foot-high skyscraper was the world's tallest when it was completed. In RECORD's pages, critic Montgomery Schuyler commended the architect for revealing its steel skeleton through a terra-cotta skin and using a gothic-style ornament to give the massive structure a sense of scale.
ANSWER: The architect for the Woolworth Building in New York (1913) was Cass Gilbert. In RECORD's pages, critic Montgomery Schuyler commended the 792-foot-high skyscraper, the tallest in the world at the time, for expressing the steel frame through its terra-cotta skin, and for imparting a sense of scale by its use of a Gothic-style vocabulary.
WINNER: Justin Viglianti, architect, HMFH Architects,Cambridge, Massachusetts
Photo courtesy Library of Congress
April 2017
CLUE: The architect designed a low-cost two-story apartment, shop, and warehouse complex in response to a working-class-housing shortage. Distinguished by balconies and cantilevers and taut, planar curved forms, the scheme soon became emblematic of the international style.
ANSWER: The architect for the strikingly Modernist Hoek van Holland workers’ housing in Rotterdam is J.J.P. Oud. Finished in 1927, the two-story complex provided 41 dwelling units plus shops, warehouses, and a public library. While the balconies and cantilevers were concrete, most of the construction is masonry and plaster.
WINNER: Courtney Kelly, principal, Courtney Christy Kelly, Architect, Birmingham, Alabama
Photo courtesy Collection Nai
March 2017
CLUE: A public library designed by an early-modern architect achieves a symbolically powerful effect by combining abstracted classical forms with contemporary functional planning.
ANSWER: The architect for the Stockholm Public Library (1928) is Erik Gunnar Asplund, known in Sweden for an early modern architecture that distilled a neoclassical vocabulary. In solving the contemporary functional needs of a city library, Asplund evoked the spirit of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s Barrière de la Villette (Paris,1789) while introducing a spirit of the new.
WINNER: John Kurtz, partner, Mitchell/Giurgola Architects, New York City
Photo © Flickr Creative Commons User Endumen
February 2017
CLUE: An influential theoretician and architect inventively combined motifs from classical antiquity in his design of a green and white marble facade for a church dating to 1300.
ANSWER: The architect of the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence (1470) is Leon Battista Alberti, who established his reputation with theoretical treatises about art, sculpture, and architecture (De Re Aedificatoria). His inventive polychromatic facade for this medieval religious building paid homage to Roman Classicism and helped set a standard for Renaissance architecture.
WINNER: Susan Shoemaker, lead architect, McKissack +McKissack, New York City
Photo © Jebulon via Wikimedia Commons
January 2017
CLUE: The architect for this exhibition building belonged to a group of artists breaking away from tradition at the turn of the 20th century. The scheme, while symmetrical in composition and festooned with ornament and a dome of gilt laurel leaves, anticipated modernist architecture with its planar exterior walls and flexible, open plan.
ANSWER: The architect of the Secession Building in Vienna is Joseph Maria Olbrich. As a founder of the avant-garde art group Wiener Sezession, he designed its headquarters and exhibition hall (1897–98) in a protomodern style with planar walls, an open plan, and ornament influenced by the Jugendstil.
WINNER: Bruce Prescott, principal, Santos Prescott and Associates, San Francisco, California
Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons
November 2016
CLUE: The designer for an "academical village" of neoclassical pavilions placed around a grassy lawn was not an architect by training. Although he devoted his energies to other pursuits, his talents for this partiuclar art won him much recognition.
ANSWER: Thomas Jefferson, after he had retired from the presidency of the United States, he helped found the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1819. He also conceived the plan and design of this handsomely proportioned and detailed classical style “academical village,” among several other architectural projects.
WINNER: Nareg Kurtjian, design professional, HOK, Chicago, Illinois
Photo © Library of Congress
October 2016
CLUE: The neoclassical architect experimented inventively with his house in ways that anticipated the future. In a breakfast room, a domed ceiling springing from four pendentive arches, inset with circular mirrors, and topped by a lantern, foreshadowed modernism's layering of spaces, suspended ceilings, and bounced light sources.
ANSWER: Sir John Soane, who was considered one of the most inventive architects of his day, created a house-museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, as part of a project involving three adjoining properties, carried out between 1792 and 1824. Beacuse of its manipulation of light, space, and taut planes, the Breakfast Room at No. 13 has won great accliam from modern architects.
WINNER: Ruth DeBoer, architectural designer, Commonwealth Architects, Richmond, Virginia
Photo © Gareth Gardner
September 2016
CLUE: A 19th-century architect who boldly experimented with an eclectic medieval vocabulary gave his home city a ruggedly masonic character. Today a leading university's fine arts and architecture library is housed in one of his buildings.
ANSWER: Frank Furness, whose firm, Furness and Evans, completed the University of Pennsylvania's first library building in 1891. Now known as the Furness Building and housing the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library, it is known for its distinctive, picturesquely electic style.
WINNER: Doulas Abbatiello, architect, Olsavsky Jaminet Architects, Youngstown, Ohio.
Photo © Wikimedia Commons
August 2016
CLUE: The main hall of this basilica of commerce features a glass roof where light bounces off aluminum fittings and passes through its translucent glass-block floor. The proto-modern concrete structure now includes a museum honoring its visionary architect.
ANSWER: Otto Wagner, who completed the Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna in 1912, the year his work appeared in RECORD (May 1912). The building, commended for its modern lines and use of aluminum, translucent glass block, and reinforced concrete, also featured furniture designed by the architect.
WINNER: Meng Howe Lim, associate, Gund Partnership, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Photo © Maggie Jeanlee
July 2016
CLUE: The architect for this neoclassical museum influenced the development of the building type with a plan featuring galleries arranged around a central rotunda. Its grand stoa, edged by a screen of columns and containing open staircases, emphasizes its role as a public monument connected to the city.
ANSWER: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who designed the first public museum on what is now Berlin’s Museum Island. His Altes (Old) Museum, which opened in 1830, houses a collection of antiquities befitting the exemplary neoclassical architecture.
Photo © Library of Congress
June 2016
CLUE: An early monument to the international style was designed by an unlikely pair of architects for a normally conservative client. Once an office building and bank, the sleek structure is now a hotel.
ANSWER: Howe & Lescaze, a firm that designed the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society in 1932 in central Philadelphia—the first International Style high-rise in the United States. In 2000, the bank, office and retail building was converted to the Loews Philadelphia Hotel.
WINNER: Peyton Boyd, president, Peyton Boyd Architect, Abingdon, Virginia
May 2016
CLUE: A young architect's design of a polychromed, solid stone church with rounded arches proved to be an influential alternative to the prevalent Gothic idiom of the time. A style was even named after him.
ANSWER: Henry Hobson Richardson, whose Trinity Church in Boston was completed in 1877. Richardson's successful interpretation of the Romanesque vocabulary led to a style known as Richardson Romanesque.
WINNER: Jerry Vargas, architect, VPDA Consulting, Las Vegas, Nevada
April 2016
CLUE: A landmark modernist house was famous for its retractable living room windows, where alternating glass panels could sink into the basement to give the living room a sense of being outdoors. The residence, long in disrepair, has recently been renovated.
ANSWER: Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe. He designed the Tugendhat Villa in Brno, Czech Republic, in 1930. The partially steel-frame and plastered-masonry house is perched on a slope where the entrance is on the top floor, facing the street. The living and dining areas, on the lower level, look out to a garden through an 80-foot-long band of alternately retractable glass windows. The house, extensively renovated in 2012, is part of the Brno City Museum.
March 2016
CLUE: A large automotive plant with a concrete-frame structure paved the way for a number of such factories designed by its architect. While this complex has been closed for decades, a developer now plans to renovate the industrial ruin for new uses.
ANSWER: Albert Kahn Associates. After the Packard Automotive Plant opened in 1903 in Detroit, Kahn came up with the reinforced-concrete structural system for Building No. 10 that proved to be a pioneering technique for U.S. factories. The Packard Plant hasn't been operational since the late 1990's, but the same firm is working with developer Fernando Palazuelo to convert the former factory to mixed uses.
WINNER: James Carroll, principal, James M. Carroll Architect, Staten Island, New York
February 2016
CLUE: An architect achieved international renown with the conversion of a former railway station to a museum of art. The Beaux Arts building had been threatened with demolition but was saved, thanks to the growing enthusiasm for adapting historic structures to new uses.
ANSWER: Gae Aulenti. In 1986, her Milan-based firm, working with the French office of A.C.T. Architecture, transformed the palatial Quai d’Orsay train station in Paris, designed by Victor Laloux in 1900, into the Musée d’Orsay, which exhibits art from 1848 to 1915.
WINNER: Elise Seingier, architectural designer, CAW Architects, Palo Alto, California
Photo © Daniel Vondran/DXR
January 2016
CLUE: Two architectural firms collaborated on the design of this modernist school known for its intimately scaled classroom and their relationship to the outdoors. Only those who guess both firms correctly are eligible for the prize.
ANSWER: Eliel and Eero Saarinen, along with Perkins, Wheeler & Will (now Perkins + Will). The two offices teamed up to design the influential, modernist Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1940–41.
WINNER: Jeffrey Siddell, senior architect, Todd & Associates, Phoenix, Arizona
Photo © Ken Hedrich, Hedrich Blessing Photographers
December 2015
CLUE: While the architects had a solid reputation for the design of commercial buildings, this tower—the world's tallest from 1931 to 1970—proved their crowning achievement. And now, it's the home of Architectural Record.
ANSWER: Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, with William F. Lamb as the lead designer for the Empire State Building in New York City.
WINNER: H. James Stannard, architect, Jenkins & Huntington, Avon, Connecticut
November 2015
CLUE: Although this much-publicized design school made its architect, a former student, famous, the young talent was to find more opportunities to build in other countries.
ANSWER: John Andrews, who designed Gund Hall for Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (1967–72), from which he graduated in 1958. He subsequently practiced in Toronto before returning to his native country of Australia.
WINNER: Sanjay Chapekar, senior architect, Polleo Group, Reston, Virginia
Photo © Bruce T. Martin
October 2015
CLUE: The architect’s design for a temporary Beaux Arts-style exhibition hall at a fair was rebuilt as a popular permanent museum.
ANSWER: Charles B. Atwood, who, working for D.H. Burnham and Company, designed numerous temporary structures for the world’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. His Palace of Fine Arts, a Greco-Roman-style pavilion, was rebuilt from 1933 to 1940 as the permanent home of the Museum of Science and Industry.
WINNER: Patrick St. Louis, senior designer, Thornton Tomasetti, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Photo © Tina Mete
September 2015
CLUE: Considered one of the great symphonic halls of the modern era, its architect is credited with originating acoustically immersive vineyard-style seating.
ANSWER: Hans Scharoun. His design for the Chamber Music Hall (1987) was carried out by Edgar Wisniewski, after Scharoun’s death. The more intimate hall is next to Scharoun’s earlier Berliner Philharmonie (1963) in Berlin’s Kulturforum.
WINNER: Joseph Molek, architect, Stieglitz Snyder Architecture, Buffalo, New York
Photo © Dennis Gilbert
August 2015
CLUE: The open-plan work space of this two-story office building is noted for its glass ceiling and clerestory, reinforced-concrete columns, and furnishings all by the same architect.
ANSWER: Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the SC Johnson Administration Building (1939) in Racine, Wisconsin. The dendriform columns of the Great Workroom are shown at left.
WINNER: David Bibliowicz, architectural designer, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, San Francisco.
Photo © Carol M. Highsmith / America Collection, Library of Congress
July 2015
CLUE: An architect known for lightweight structures designed a colorful, festive cable-supported tent to be used for receptions in a garden in a hot climate.
ANSWER: Frei Otto, who designed the Diplomatic Club Heart Tent in 1980, a cable-supported structure in the gardens of the Tuwaiq Palace, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
WINNER: Konstantinos Dimitropoulos, job captain, Ted Moudis Associates, New York City
Photo © Christine Kanstinger
June 2015
CLUE: An architect’s competition-winning scheme for a hospital brought fresh air, light, and views to tuberculosis patients and became a landmark example of modern design for healing.
ANSWER: Alvar Aalto, who completed the Paimio Sanatorium near Turku, Finland, in 1933. The design of the reinforced-concrete frame building for tuberculosis patients featured rooms with balconies angled for sunlight and views of the surrounding forest.
WINNER: Thomas Wyaux, Manager of Special Projects, Municipal Arts Society, New York City.
Photo © The Alvar Aalto Museum
May 2015
CLUE: A principal of a well-known architectural firm designed a private library featuring a Renaissance inspired rare-book room for one of the richest men of the Gilded age.
ANSWER: Charles Mckim of Mckim, Mead & White, who designed the Morgan Library and its Renaissance-inspired east room for John Pierpont Morgan in New York in 1906.
WINNER: James Vira, Director of Design, BL Companies, New York City, New York
Photo © The Morgan Library
April 2015
CLUE: Now considered a landmark, the Octagonal house for an aerospace engineer was designed by an architect known for Futuristic designs and loved by the film community.
ANSWER: John Lautner, who designed the octagonal Chemosphere House (1961) in Los Angeles for an aerospace engineer. It was featured in Brian de Palma’s Body Double, among other films.
WINNER: Arturo Vazquez, owner/principal, Design W Architects, Patagonia, Arizona
Photo © Alan Weintraub/arcaid.co.uk
March 2015
CLUE: A well-known follower of Mies veered toward apostasy by incorporating semi-classical motifs into his work, as at this museum. Forty years later he expanded the building in a straightforward modernist manner.
ANSWER: Philip Johnson, who designed the Amon Carter Museum in 1961. In 1977, he and partner John Burgee expanded it; then, in 2001, Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie Architects enlarged and reworked the museum yet again.
WINNER: William Rudd, FAIA, former dean of the College of Architecture and Planning, University of Tennessee.
Photo © Steve Watson
February 2015
CLUE: A Modernist architect's striking conversion of a centuries-old structure for a museum boldly juxtaposes the new with the old to emphasize their separate identities.
ANSWER: Carlo Scarpa, who renovated the historic Castelvecchio for a museum in Verona, Italy, from 1957 to 1974.
WINNER: Eva Camacho, architectural designer, Swaback Partners, Scottsdale, Arizona
Photo © Richard Bryant
January 2015
CLUE: An architect famous for designing country houses devoted a number of years to a palatial residence commended for its combination of western and eastern motifs.
ANSWER: Putting together the January issue of RECORD, we worried that our selection was too easy! But it wasn't: because of a production error, the wrong photo accompanies the clue. The image shows Sir Herbert Baker's North Block of the Secretariat for New Delhi (1931); the clue refers to Sir Edwin Lutyens's Viceroy's House, now Rashtrapati Bhavan (1931), nearby. If you guessed either or both architects who collaborated on this civic center, you were eligible to win the prize.
WINNER: Serena Losonczy, senior associate architect, PBDW Architects, New York City.
Photo © Laurie Jones