10 Bridges with Incredible Structures

Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk. Born in Horten, Norway in 1958. Studied at the Oslo School of Architecture 1978-84 and at the Cooper Union, New York 1984-85. Worked at the architectural office of the Norwegian State Railways 1986-88.

He has taught at the Oslo School of Architecture and at the Rhode Island School of Design, and lectured at other schools of architecture. He has maintained a private practice in Oslo since 1992.

Hølmebakk was nominated for Mies van der Rohe Pavillion Award in 1996, 2000 and 2009 and has received several Norwegian architecture prizes. His recent work includes "Branntomta" commercial and residential buildings in the centre of Trondheim (as part of Team3, with Arne Henriksen and Jensen & Skodvin), Visitors Centre at "Bjerkebæk" museum in Lillehammer and Sohlbergplassen Viewpoint in the Rondane Mountain.

Wilkinson Eyre, twice winners of both the prestigious RIBA Stirling Prize and the RIBA Lubetkin Prize, is one of the UK’s leading architecture practices. Its portfolio of bold, beautiful, intelligent architecture includes the Guangzhou International Finance Center – one of the tallest buildings in the world; the giant, cooled conservatories for Gardens by the Bay in Singapore, the new Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth and the acclaimed temporary structure of the London 2012 Basketball Arena. Current projects  include the  refurbishment of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Grade II-listed Battersea Power Station, the new medicine galleries for the Science Museum and a resort hotel for Crown in Sydney.

Richard Meier is well known and respected around the world for his architecture and designs. He has been awarded major commissions in the United States and Europe including courthouses, city halls, museums, corporate headquarters, housing and private residences. Some of his best-known projects include The Getty Center in Los Angeles, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Frankfurt Museum for Decorative Arts in Germany, the Canal Plus Television Headquarters in Paris, the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, and the Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana.

Recognized with the highest honors available in architecture, in 1997 he received the AIA Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects as well as the Praemium Imperiale from the Japanese Government, in recognition of a lifetime achievement in the arts. In 1995, he was elected Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Deutscher Architekture Preis in 1993 and in 1992 the French Government awarded him with the honor of Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 1989, the Royal Institute of British Architects, of which he is a Fellow, awarded him the Royal Gold Medal.

In 1984, Mr. Meier was awarded the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, considered the field's highest honor. He was the youngest recipient of this award in the history of the prize. In the same year, Mr. Meier was selected architect for the prestigious commission to design the $1 billion Getty Center in Los Angeles, California.

Since receiving his architectural education at Cornell University, he has been awarded honorary degrees from the University of Naples, New Jersey Institute of Technology, The New School for Social Research, Pratt Institute and the University of Bucharest.

Mr. Meier has given numerous lectures throughout the world and participated in many juries. He has written and been the subject of many books and monographs and innumerable newspaper and magazine articles. In addition to being on the Board of Directors of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the American Academy in Rome, he is also a Fellow of the French and Belgian Academies d'Architecture, and a member of the Bund Deutscher Architekten and the American Academy of Arts & Letters, from which he received the Brunner Prize for Architecture in 1976.

Mr. Meier has taught at Cooper Union, Princeton University, Pratt Institute, Harvard University, Yale University and UCLA. He currently holds the Frank T. Rhodes Class of 1956 University Professorship at Cornell University. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and received a Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter in 1980 and the Gold Medal from the Los Angeles Chapter in 1998. His numerous design awards include 29 National AIA Honor Awards and 53 Regional AIA Design Awards.

Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

​Olafur Eliasson (Copenhagen, 1967) studied at the Royal Academy of the Arts in Copenhagen between 1989 and 1995. He represented Denmark in the 2003 Venice Biennale and has exhibited his work at numerous international museums. His work is part of private and public collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and Tate Modern in London, where his seminal work The weather project was exhibited. Eliasson lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen.

Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The weather project at Tate Modern, London. Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, a survey exhibition organised by SFMOMA in 2007, travelled until 2010 to various venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

As professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Eliasson founded the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute of Space Experiments) in 2009, an innovative model of arts education. In 2012, he launched Little Sun, a solar-powered lamp developed together with the engineer Frederik Ottesen to improve the lives of the approximately 1.6 billion people worldwide without access to electricity. Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre, for which he created the façade in collaboration with Henning Larsen Architects, was awarded the Mies van der Rohe Award 2013.

Verklighetsmaskiner (Reality machines) at t he Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2015, became the museum’s most visited show by a living artist. In 2016 Eliasson created a series of interventions for the palace and gardens of Versailles, including an enormous artificial waterfall that cascaded into the Grand Canal.

His other projects include Studio Other Spaces, an international office for art and architecture which he founded in Berlin in 2014 with  architect Sebastian Behmann; and Little Sun, a social business and global project providing clean, affordable light  and encouraging sustainable development, with engineer Frederik  Ottesen.