1.
Aston Webb
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He was President of the Royal Academy from 1919 to 1924, and the founding Chairman of the London Society. He returned to London in 1874 to set up his own practice, from the early 1880s, he joined the Royal Institute of British Architects and began working in partnership with Ingress Bell. Their first major commission was a design for the Victoria Law Courts in Birmingham. Towards the end of his career Webb was assisted by his sons, Maurice, ralph Knott, who designed Londons County Hall, began his work as an apprentice to Webb executing the drawings for his competition entries. He died in Kensington, London, on 21 August 1930 and he served as RIBA President and, having been elected as a full member of the Royal Academy in 1903, served as acting president from 1919 to 1924. He received the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in 1905 and was the first recipient of the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1907 and he was the first chairman of the London Society in 1912. One of his earliest works was built for the Six Masters of The Royal Grammar School Worcester in 1877 and these almshouses are in the Arts and Crafts style, different from his later work. Webbs first major work was the restoration of the medieval St Bartholomew-the-Great in Smithfield and his brother Edward Alfred Webb was the churchwarden at the time, and his association with the church probably helped the young architect get the job. In London, Webbs best known include the Queen Victoria Memorial and The Mall approach to, and the principal facade of, Buckingham Palace. Webb also designed the Victoria and Albert Museums main building, the Royal United Services Institute, Whitehall and he also designed the Britannia Royal Naval College, Devon, where Royal Naval officers are still trained. He enlarged and sympathetically restored the perpendicular Church of St John Baptist, Claines, Worcester, nearby he was also responsible for the new church of St. George, consecrated in 1895, which replaced an earlier smaller building in St. Georges Square, Barbourne, Worcester. With his partner Ingress Bell, he extended St Andrews Church, in Fulham Fields, London, remodelled the chancel, residential commissions included Nos 2 and 4 Blackheath Park, in Blackheath, south-east London. He also designed a library wing, including the Cedar Library, at The Hendre, in March 1889 the consistory of the French Protestant Church of London commissioned Aston Webb to design a new church. It was erected in 1891–93 at 8–9 Soho Square in London, the church is one of Aston Webbs Gothic school works. In 1901 Aston Webb designed the headquarters for a brewery at 115 Tooley Street, London and this was done as part of the development of More London. Weetman Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray, commissioned Webb to undertake major extensions to his property, Dunecht House, Aberdeenshire, at the University of Birmingham, the whole of the original scheme, in the Byzantine style, was the product of the Webb-Bell partnership. This consisted of a building with five radial blocks. The central building of Chancellors Court containing the Great Hall is named after Aston Webb, the main feature is a large dome that sits atop the entrance logia
2.
American Institute of Architects
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The American Institute of Architects is a professional organization for architects in the United States. The AIA also works with members of the design and construction team to help coordinate the building industry. The AIA is currently headed by Robert Ivy, FAIA as EVP/Chief Executive Officer and Thomas V. Vonier, wells, with Richard Upjohn serving as the first president. They met on February 23,1857 and decided to invite 16 other prominent architects to join them, including Alexander Jackson Davis, Thomas U. Prior to their establishment of the AIA, anyone could claim to be an architect and they drafted a constitution and bylaws by March 10,1857, under the name New York Society of Architects. Walter, of Philadelphia, later suggested the name be changed to American Institute of Architects, the members signed the new constitution on April 15,1857, having filed a certificate of incorporation two days earlier. As of 2008, AIA has more than 300 chapters, the AIA is headquartered at 1735 New York Avenue, NW in Washington, D. C. A design competition was held in the mid-1960s to select an architect for a new AIA headquarters in Washington, mitchell/Giurgola won the design competition but failed to get approval of the design concept from the United States Commission of Fine Arts. The firm resigned the commission and helped select The Architects Collaborative to redesign the building, the design, led by TAC principals Norman Fletcher and Howard Elkus, was ultimately approved in 1970 and completed in 1973. More than 90,000 licensed architects and associated professionals are members, AIA members adhere to a code of ethics and professional conduct intended to assure clients, the public, and colleagues of an architects dedication to the highest standards in professional practice. There are five levels of membership in the AIA, Architect members are licensed to practice architecture in the United States, international associate members hold an architecture license or the equivalent from a licensing authority outside the United States. Emeritus members have been AIA members for 15 successive years and are at least 65 years of age or are incapacitated, allied membership is a partnership with the AIA and the American Architectural Foundation. The AIA’s most prestigious honor is the designation of a member as a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and this membership is awarded to members who have made contributions of national significance to the profession. Slightly more than 2,600, or 2% of all members, have elevated to the AIA College of Fellows. Foreign architects of prominence may be elected to the College as Honorary Fellows of the AIA, the AIA is governed by a Board of Directors and has a staff of over 200 full-time employees. Although the AIA functions as an organization, at its heart are some 300 local. The components are spread throughout the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, by speaking with a united voice, AIA architects influence government practices that affect the practice of the profession and the quality of American life. The AIA monitors legislative and regulatory actions and uses the power of its membership to participate in decisionmaking by federal, state
3.
Paul Williams (architect)
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Paul Revere Williams, FAIA was an American architect based in Los Angeles, California. He practiced largely in Southern California and designed the homes of celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Lon Chaney, Barbara Stanwyck. He also designed many public and private buildings, orphaned at four years of age, Williams was the only African American student in his elementary school. He studied at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and at the Los Angeles branch of the New York Beaux-Arts Institute of Design Atelier and he went on to attend the University of Southern California, designing several residential buildings while still a student there. Williams became an architect in 1921, and the first certified African-American architect west of the Mississippi. He married Della Mae Givens on June 27,1917, at the First AME Church in Los Angeles and they had three children, Paul Revere Williams, Jr. Marilyn Frances Williams, and Norma Lucille Williams. Williams won a competition at age 25, and three years later opened his own office. Known as a draftsman, he perfected the skill of rendering drawings upside down. This skill was developed so that his clients could see the drawings rendered right side up across the table from him. Struggling to gain attention, he served on the first Los Angeles City Planning Commission in 1920, from 1921 through 1924, Williams worked for Los Angeles architect John C. Austin, eventually becoming chief draftsman, before establishing his own office, in 1923, Williams became the first African-American member of the American Institute of Architects. In 1939, he won the AIA Award of Merit for his design of the MCA Building in Los Angeles, during World War II, Williams worked for the Navy Department as an architect. In 1951, Williams won the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc, man of the Year award and in 1953 he received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP for his outstanding contributions as an architect and member of the African-American community. Williams also received doctorates from Lincoln University of Missouri, Howard University. In 1956, he won an award for service, from Wisdom Magazine, for contributions to knowledge, in 1957, he became the first black member to be inducted into the AIAs College of Fellows. An April 2,1957 letter from the Executive Secretary of AIA, book, The Small Home of Tomorrow, with a successor volume New Homes for Today. Essay, I Am a Negro, American Magazine, in 2004, USC honored him by listing him among its distinguished alumni, in the television commercial for the school shown during its football games. In 2017, Williams will be honored with the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal
4.
Robert Venturi
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Robert Charles Venturi, Jr. is an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the major architectural figures in the twentieth century. Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped to shape the way that architects, planners and students experience and think about architecture and their buildings, planning, theoretical writings, and teaching have also contributed to the expansion of discourse about architecture. Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 1991, the prize was awarded to him alone, a group of women architects attempted to get her name added retroactively to the prize, but the Pritzker Prize jury declined to do so. Venturi is also known for coining the maxim Less is a bore, Venturi lives in Philadelphia with Denise Scott Brown. Venturi was born in Philadelphia to Robert Venturi, Sr. Venturi attended school at the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1947 where he was a member-elect of Phi Beta Kappa and he received his M. F. A. from Princeton in 1950. In 1951 he briefly worked under Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and he was awarded the Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 1954, where he studied and toured Europe for two years. From 1954 to 1965, Venturi held teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as Kahns teaching assistant, an instructor and it was there, in 1960, that he met fellow faculty member, architect and planner Denise Scott Brown. Venturi taught later at the Yale School of Architecture and was a lecturer with Scott Brown in 2003 at Harvard Universitys Graduate School of Design. A controversial critic of the blithely functionalist and symbolically vacuous architecture of modernism during the 1950s. Derived from course lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, Venturi received a grant from the Graham Foundation in 1965 to aid in its completion, the book demonstrated, through countless examples, an approach to understanding architectural composition and complexity, and the resulting richness and interest. Drawing from both vernacular and high-style sources, Venturi introduced new lessons from the buildings of both familiar and then forgotten. The book has been translated and published in 18 languages, immediately hailed as a theorist and designer with radical ideas, Venturi went to teach a series of studios at the Yale School of Architecture in the mid-1960s. This second manifesto was an even more stinging rebuke to orthodox modernism, the book coined the terms Duck and Decorated Shed — descriptions of the two predominant ways of embodying iconography in buildings. The work of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown adopted the strategy, producing formally simple decorated sheds with rich, complex. Though he and his wife co-authored several additional books at the end of the century, venturis buildings typically juxtapose architectural systems, elements and aims, to acknowledge the conflicts often inherent in a project or site. Venturi created the firm Venturi and Short with William Short in 1960, after John Rauch replaced Short as partner in 1964, the firms name changed to Venturi and Rauch. Venturi married Denise Scott Brown on July 23,1967 in Santa Monica, California, in 1980, The firms name became Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, and after Rauchs resignation in 1989, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates
