Paris, Best Architecture Guide. 20 unmissable buildings to see in the city of Paris

Richard Rogers. (Florencia, July 23, 1933 - London, December 18, 2021) Since founding the practice in 1977, Richard Rogers has gained international reknown as an architect and urbanist. He is the 2007 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate, recipient of the 1985 RIBA Gold Medal and the 2006 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (La Biennale di Venezia). He was knighted in 1991, made a life peer in 1996 and a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in 2008.

Alain D. Moatti. Born, 04/08/1957, French. Architect with a DPLG diploma from the Paris-Villemin School of Architecture, 1988. Member of the Academy of Architecture. Alain MOATTI has 30 years of experience in the domains of architecture, interior architecture, scenography and design. After different experiences with architectural agencies between 1985 and 1994, he opened his own architecture and scenography agency in 1994. In 2001 he met Henri Rivière (1965-2010) with whom he founded the Moatti – Rivière agency the following year.

Professiona l Experience.- 2012 Alain Moatti is inducted into the Academy of Architecture.  1990 - 1993 Babel Agency: scenographic productions for the Lyon Opera, the Centre of Congress of Tours and the International Conference Centre of Paris. 1985 - 1990 Creation of décor for the theatre, exhibitions and events. Worked with Antti Lovag for Pierre Cardin in Théoule - sur - Mer.

Education. 1997 DEA in socio-cultural history of the theme “Modernity in Tel - Aviv” for the Architecture School of Versailles. 1986 CEAA in scenography with Favre and Perrotet. 1985 Architectural diploma DPLG from the Paris - Villemin School of Architecture. 1979 CAP in photography.

Renzo Piano was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1937 to a family of builders. He graduated Milan Polytechnic in 1964 and began to work with experimental light-weight structures and basic shelters. In 1971, he founded the Piano & Rogers studio and, together with Richard Rogers, won the competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. From the early 1970s to the 1990s, Piano collaborated with engineer Peter Rice, founding Atelier Piano & Rice in 1977. In 1981, he established the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, with offices today in Genoa, Paris and New York. Renzo Piano has been awarded the highest honors in architecture, including; the Pritzker Prize; RIBA Royal Gold Medal; Medaille d’Or, UIA; Erasmus Prize; and most recently, the Gold Medal of the AIA.

Gehry Partners, LLP. The Gehry Partners team on the Battersea project is headed by Craig Webb and Brian Aamoth. Gehry Partners, LLP is a full service architectural firm with extensive international experience in the design and construction of academic, museum, theater, performance, commercial, and master planning projects.

Founded in 1962 and located in Los Angeles, California, Gehry Partners currently has a staff of approximately 125 people. Every project undertaken by Gehry Partners has Frank Gehry personally involved. Frank is supported by the broad resources of the firm and the extensive experience of the firm’s senior partners and staff. On Battersea, the design team will be led by Craig Webb who has collaborated with Frank for over 20 years. Current projects include: Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; LUMA Foundation in Arles, France; Divan Orchestra in Berlin; Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C.; King Street Development in Toronto, Ontario; Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia; Q-MOCA in Quanzhou, China; and West Campus for Facebook in Menlo Park, California. Projects under construction include the Puente de Vida Museum of Biodiversity in Panama; Foundation Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris, France and the Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building for the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

Raised in Toronto, Canada, Frank Gehry moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1947. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from USC in 1954, and studied city planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He founded Gehry Partners, LLP, in Los Angeles in 1962, a full-service architectural firm that developed extensive international experience in the design and construction of academic, museum, theater, performance and commercial projects.

Hallmarks of Mr. Gehry’s work include a concern that people dwell comfortably within the spaces that he creates, and an insistence that his buildings address the context and culture of their sites.

Despite his international stature and renown, he continues to be closely associated with Los Angeles, where his 1978 redesign of his Santa Monica home launched his international career.

“Frank holds a special place in his art for the work of contemporary artists. He was a central figure in the contemporary art world in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s, working closely with Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, John Altoon, Bob Irwin, Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha and Ken Price. And he continues to work closely with artists, including Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons, for whom he has collaborated on deeply sensitive installations of their work,” said Cuno. “Given his contributions to architecture, and the Getty’s extensive research and collections in Los Angeles art and architecture at the mid-century and beyond, and the commitment of the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute to the conservation and study of modern architecture, it is fitting that we present Frank with our highest honor.”

Kazuyo Sejima (Ibaraki, Japan, 1956) and Ryue Nishizawa (Kanagawa, Japan, 1966) worked independently from each other before founding the SANAA Ltd. studio in 1995. Having studied architecture at the Japan Women’s University, Sejima went on to work for the renowned architect Toyo Ito. She set up her own studio in 1987 and in 1992 was proclaimed Young Architect of the Year in Japan. Nishizawa studied architecture at the Yokohama National University. In addition to his work with Sejima, he has had his own practice since 1997.

The studio has built several extraordinarily successful commercial and institutional buildings, civic centres, homes and museums both in Japan and elsewhere. These include the O Museum in Nagano (1999) and the N Museum in Wakayama (1997), the Day-Care Center in Yokohama (2000), the Prada Beauty Store in Tokyo and Hong Kong (2001), the Issey Miyake and Christian Dior Building in Tokyo (2003) and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (2004). Sejima also designed the famous Small House in Tokyo (2000), the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion, Toledo, Ohio (2001-2006), the extension to the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain (2002 – ), the Zollverein School, Essen, Germany (2003-2006), the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2003-2007) and the Novartis Campus WSJ-157 Office Building, Basle, Switzerland (2003 – ).

In 2004 Sejima and Nishizawa were awarded the Golden Lion at the 9th Venice Architecture Biennale for their distinguished work on the Metamorph exhibition.

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have won the 2010 Pritzker Prize.

The 12th International Architecture Exhibition, was directed by Kazuyo Sejima, the first woman to direct the venice architecture biennale, since its inception in 1980.

Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima. Kazuyo Sejima

Lacaton & Vassal. Anne Lacaton y Jean Phillippe Vassal crearon la oficina en 1989, con sede en París. La oficina realiza su práctica profesional en Francia, así como en el extanjero, trabajando en varios edificios y en diferentes programas de planeamiento urbano.

Anne LACATON nace en Francia en 1955. Se graduó en la Escuela de Arquitectura de Bordeaux en 1980, y se diplomó en Planeamiento Urbano en la Universidad de Burdeos en 1984. Es profesor invitado en la Universidad de Madrid desde 2007, y fue invitada en 2011 a la Escuela Politécnica de Lausanne, así como en Harvard GSD Studio en París en 2011.

Jean Philippe VASSAL nació en Casablanca, Marruecos, en 1954. Se graduó en la Escuela de Arquitectura de Burdeos en 1980. Trabajó como urbanista en Níger entre 1980 y 1985. Es profesor en la UdK Berlin desde 2012, y ha sido profesor invitado en el TU Berlin entre 2007-2010, y en la Escuela Politécnica de Lausanne en 2010-11.

Principales premios, el Grand Prix National d'Architecture, Francia, 2008, el Rolf Schock Prize, categoría de artes visuales, Suecia 2014, el Daylight & Bulding Components Award, Velum Fonden, Dinamarca, 2011, y el International Fellowship del Royal Institute of British Architects in 2009, el Equerre d'Argent Award 2011, con Frédéric Druot, Francia. Su trabajo ha sido selecionado varias veces y ha sido doblemente finalista del Mies Van der Rohe Award, European Prize for Contemporary Architecture.

Los trabajos más importantes finalizados por la oficina son: el FRAC, Colección de Arte Contemporánea Pública, en Dunkerque, Francia; el Palacio de Tokio, París, Lugar para la creación contemporánea; vivienda social y residencia de estudiantes en París; el hall de música y polivalente en Lille; el Café para el Architektur Zentrum en Vienna; la Escuela de Negocios y Dirección en Burdeos; la Escuela de Arquitectura en Nantes, y proyectos de vivienda significativos en Francia como la Casa Latapie, Burdeos; la casa en los árboles, de cara a la Bahía Arcachon, la "Cité Manifeste" en Mulhouse. Actualmente están trabajando en la transformación de una vivienda social modernista: la Transformación del Tour Bois le Prête en París (con Frédéric Druot, arquitecto), en St Nazaire la Chesnaie y en Burdeos Grand Parc (con F Druot y Ch. Hutin, arquitectos). Todos estos proyectos se basan en un principio de generosidad y economía, sirviendo a la vida, los usuarios y el propietario, con el objetivo de cambiar los estándares.

Tadao Ando was born in Osaka, Japan in 1941. A self-educated architect, he spent time in nearby Kyoto and Nara, studying firsthand the great monuments of traditional Japanese architecture. Between 1962 and 1969 he traveled to the United States, Europe, and Africa, learning about Western architecture, history, and techniques. His studies of both traditional Japanese and modern architecture had a profound influence on his work and resulted in a unique blend of these rich traditions.

In 1969 Ando established Tadao Ando Architect and Associates in Osaka. He is an honorary fellow in the architecture academies of six countries; he has been a visiting professor at Yale, Columbia, and Harvard Universities; and in 1997, he became professor of architecture at Tokyo University.

Ando has received numerous architecture awards, including the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1995, the 2002 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, and also in 2002, the Kyoto Prize for lifetime achievement in the arts and philosophy. His buildings can be seen in Japan, Europe, the United States, and India.

In fall 2001, following up on the comprehensive master plan commissioned from Cooper, Robertson & Partners in the 1990s and completed in 2001, Tadao Ando was selected to develop an architectural master plan for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute to expand its buildings and enhance its 140-acre campus.

Dominique Perrault (1953), architect from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1978) and Higher Diploma in Towm Planning (1979) from the same university, based its office in 1981 in Paris, and currently has two international offices in Geneva and Madrid. He has been professor in several Architectural Schools, as the one of Rennes, New Orleans, Chicago, Barcelona, Brussels or Zurich and his work has been exhibited in museums all around the world..

Figure of French architecture, Dominique Perrault gained international recognition after having won the competition for the National French library in 1989 at the age of 36. This project marked the starting point of many other public and private commissions abroad, such as The Velodrome and Olympic swimming pool of Berlin (1992), the extension of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg in (1996), the Olympic tennis centre in Madrid (2002), the campus of Ewha’s University in Seoul (2004) and the Fukoku Tower in Osaka, Japan (2010).

He is member of the Grand Paris scientific council, was appointed curator of the French Pavilion in the 12th Architecture Biennale in Venice (2010), being the subject of the installation METROPOLIS ?.

Among the prizes he has been awarded with, the AFEX Award for the Ewha Womans University in Korea and the “Grande Médaille d’or d’Architecture” from the Académie d’Architecture in 2010, the Mies van der Rohe prize (1997), the French national Grand Prize for Architecture (1993) and the Equerre d’argent prize for the Hotel Industriel Berlier (1989).

The body of his work was assembled in a monographic exhibition: “Dominique Perrault Architecture” exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2008 and later made and itinerant show that travelled to Madrid (ICO Foundation, 2009) and Tokyo (Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, 2010). In 2015 he was awarded with the Praemium Imperiale prize, by the imperial family of Japan and Japan Art Association.

Shigeru Ban was born in Tokyo in 1957 and after studying architecture in Los Angeles and New York, he opened an architectural practice in Tokyo, in 1985, with offices in Paris and New York, has designed projects worldwide from private houses to large scale museums.

His cardboard tube structures have aroused enormous interest. As long ago as 1986, he discovered the benefits of this recyclable and resilient material that is also easy to process. Shigeru Ban built the Japanese pavilion for the Expo 2000 world exposition at Hanover – a structure made of cardboard tubes that measured 75 meters in length and 15 meters in height. All the materials used in the structure were recycled after the exhibition. He developed a genuine style of "emergency architecture" as a response to the population explosion and to natural disasters: the foundations of his low-cost houses are made of beer crates filled with sand, and the walls consist of foil-covered cardboard tubes. A house of this sort can be erected in less than seven hours, and is considerably more sturdy than a tent.

Shigeru Ban is currently Professor of Architecture at Keio University and is also a guest lecturer at various other universities across the globe; his works are so exceptional that he was awarded the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture in 2005. "Time" magazine describes him as one of the key innovators for the 21st century in the field of architecture and design.

Shigeru Ban has designed projects such as Centre Pompidou Metz and Nine Bridges Golf Clubhouse in Korea. Current projects include new headquarters for Swatch and Omega in Switzerland.

Charles Édouard Jeanneret-Gris was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland on October 6th, 1887. He is best known as Le Corbusier, one of the most important architects of the XX Century that together with Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright rise up as the fathers of Modern Architecture. In his long career, he worked in France, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Argentina, India and Japan.

Jeanneret was admitted to the Art School of La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1902. He knew Charles l’Éplattenier, his first teacher, and he became interested in architecture. He built his first house, Villa Fallet, in 1906, and one year later he set out on his first great journey to Italy. From 1908-1909 he worked in Perret Bother’s Studio, where he focussed on the employment of the concrete, and from 1910-1911 he coincided with Mies van der Rohe in this studio in Berlin.

In 1917, Charles Édouard Jeanneret set up finally in Paris. The next year he met the painter Amedée Ozenfant and he displayed his first paintings and wrote his first book, Après le Cubismo. In 1919 he founded the magazine l´Esprit nouveau, where he published unnumbered articles, signing with the pseudonym Le Corbusier for the first time.

He opened his own Studio in 1922, in the number 35 of the rue de Sèvres. In this decade when his laboratory epoch started he carried out a great number of activities as a painter, essayist, and writer. But also as an architect, he planned some of the most recognizable icons of modern architecture and developed the principles of the free plan. Some of these works are the Villa Roche-Jeanneret, the Villa Savoye in Poissy, and the Siedlungweissenhof’s houses built in Stuttgart in 1927. It should be pointed out that at the same time; he set out the “five points” of the architecture.

Le Corbusier projected “The contemporary three million population city” in 1922 and in 1925 put forward the Voisin plan of Paris, which is one of his most important urban proposals. Three years later, in 1928, through his initiative, the CIAM was created and in 1929 he published his first edition of the Oeuvre Complète.

In the 30s, he collaborated with the magazine Plans and Prélude, where he became enthusiastic about urbanism and he started, in 1930, to elaborate the drawings of the “Radiant City” as a result of the “Green City” planned for Moscu, his project would be summarized in the “Radiant Villa”, which was enclosed with the projects for Amberes, Stockholm, and Paris. By 1931 he presented Argel, a proposal that composed the Obus Plan. And in 1933 the 4th CIAM passed and there he edited the Athens Document.

Le Corbusier, in 1943, developed the “Three Human Establishments Doctrine” and founded the Constructors Assembly for Architectural Renovation (ASCORAL). He made the project the Unite d´habitation of Marsella in 1952, which was the first one of a series of similar buildings. At the same time, the works of Chandigarh in India began, where he planned the main governmental buildings. Nevertheless, in the same decade, he worked in France too, in the Notre-Dame-du-Haut chapel in Ronchamp, in the convent of La Tourette in Éveux, Jaoul’s houses in Neuilly and the Unites d´habitation of Rézé-lès-Nantes, Briey-en-Forêt and Firminy.

He wrote and published his worldwide known study of the Modulor in 1948 followed by a second part in 1953. Meanwhile the next Le Corbusier’s books had a more autobiographic nature, among them the Le poème de l'angle droit (1955), l'Atelier de la recherche patiente (1960) and Mise aupoint (1966) stand out.

Le Corbusier, at the end of his life, created many projects that would not be built, for example, a calculus center for Olivetti in Rho, Milan; a congress in Strasbourg, the France embassy in Brasilia and a new hospital in Venice.

He died drowned on the 27th of August of 1965 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.

Tomas Koolhaas. Rem Koolhaas' son, was born in London. LA based Film maker. Currently working on feature length Documentary about my father Rem Koolhaas. Before moving to the United States, he worked in various of media related jobs in his home town. He worked as the assitand to the head of programming of MTV UK, then as a set builder, set designer and lighting assistant for TANK magazine. He also had illustrations published in a bestselling architectural book. Wanting to move into the cinematic side of media. Tomas decided to study film in Hollywood at the Los Angeles Film School. He graduated with a major in cinematography.
As a student Tomas was the director of photography an a multitude of short films and even shot his first feature while at L.A.F.S. These projects not only brought acclaim from within the school, but they were also selected for and received awards at various film festivals.

Since Graduating Tomas has served as the Director of Photography on feature films, short films, music videos, commercials and documentaries, as well as directing a short on HD. These projects span all genres and formats. And due to their high standard, continue to gain recognition and receive awards from various festivals and institutions all over the world.

Tomas is expertly qualified on all popular shooting formats and various camera systems, he has developed a reputation for being able to use digital formats in a way that gets results usually only expected from film.

Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is an international practice operating within the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism. AMO, a research and design studio, applies architectural thinking to domains beyond. OMA is led by eight partners – Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, Ellen van Loon, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, Chris van Duijn, Jason Long, and Managing Partner-Architect David Gianotten – and maintains offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, Doha, and Australia. OMA-designed buildings currently under construction are the renovation of Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe) in Berlin, The Factory in Manchester, Hangzhou Prism, the CMG Times Center in Shenzhen and the Simone Veil Bridge in Bordeaux.

OMA’s completed projects include Taipei Performing Arts Centre (2022), Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Los Angeles (2020), Norra Tornen in Stockholm (2020), Axel Springer Campus in Berlin (2020), MEETT Toulouse Exhibition and Convention Centre (2020), Galleria in Gwanggyo (2020), WA Museum Boola Bardip (2020), nhow RAI Hotel in Amsterdam (2020), a new building for Brighton College (2020), and Potato Head Studios in Bali (2020). Earlier buildings include Fondazione Prada in Milan (2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), De Rotterdam (2013), CCTV Headquarters in Beijing (2012), Casa da Música in Porto (2005), and the Seattle Central Library (2004).

AMO often works in parallel with OMA's clients to fertilize architecture with intelligence from this array of disciplines. This is the case with Prada: AMO's research into identity, in-store technology, and new possibilities of content-production in fashion helped generate OMA's architectural designs for new Prada epicenter stores in New York and Los Angeles. In 2004, AMO was commissioned by the European Union to study its visual communication, and designed a colored "barcode" flag, combining the flags of all member states, which was used during the Austrian presidency of the EU. AMO has worked with Universal Studios, Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, Heineken, Ikea, Condé Nast, Harvard University and the Hermitage. It has produced Countryside: The Future, a research exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale, including Public Works (2012), Cronocaos (2010), and The Gulf (2006); and for Fondazione Prada, including When Attitudes Become Form (2012) and Serial and Portable Classics (2015). AMO, with Harvard University, was responsible for the research and curation of the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale and its publication Elements. Other notable projects are Roadmap 2050, a plan for a Europe-wide renewable energy grid; Project Japan, a 720-page book on the Metabolism architecture movement (Taschen, 2010); and the educational program of Strelka Institute in Moscow.

Jean Nouvel, (born August 12, 1945) is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture. He has obtained a number of prestigious distinctions over the course of his career, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (technically, the prize was awarded for the Institut du Monde Arabe which Nouvel designed), the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2005 and the Pritzker Prize in 2008.

Nouvel was awarded the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour, in 2008, for his work on more than 200 projects, among them, in the words of The New York Times, the "exotically louvered" Arab World Institute, the bullet-shaped and "candy-colored" Torre Agbar in Barcelona, the "muscular" Guthrie Theater with its cantilevered bridge in Minneapolis, and in Paris, the "defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric" Musée du quai Branly (2006) and the Philharmonie de Paris (a "trip into the unknown" c. 2012).

Pritzker points to several more major works: in Europe, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (1994), the Culture and Convention Center in Lucerne (2000), the Opéra Nouvel in Lyon (1993) , Expo 2002 in Switzerland and, under construction, the Copenhagen Concert Hall and the courthouse in Nantes (2000); as well as two tall towers in planning in North America, Tour Verre in New York City and a cancelled condominium tower in Los Angeles. International cultural projects such as the Abu Dhabi Louvre, the Philharmonic Hall in Paris, the Qatar National Museum in Doha, or the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010 in London.

In its citation, the jury of the Pritzker prize noted:

Of the many phrases that might be used to describe the career of architect Jean Nouvel, foremost are those that emphasize his courageous pursuit of new ideas and his challenge of accepted norms in order to stretch the boundaries of the field. [...] The jury acknowledged the ‘persistence, imagination, exuberance, and, above all, an insatiable urge for creative experimentation’ as qualities abundant in Nouvel’s work.

Among his principal completed projects, we find the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Cartier Foundation and the Quai Branly museum in Paris, the Culture and Congress Center KKL in Lucerne, the extension of the Queen Sofia Arts Center in Madrid, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Philharmonic of Paris…
 
Among the projects currently under studies or under construction: the “53W53, Tour de Verre” integrating the extension of the MoMA galleries in New York, the residential towers “Le Nouvel” in Kuala Lumpur, “Anderson 18” and “Ardmore” in Singapore and “Rosewood” in São Paulo, the office towers “Hekla” and “Duo” in Paris, the cultural complex “The Artists’ Garden” in Qingdao or the National Art Museum of China NAMOC in Beijing… The design of the Louvre Abu Dhabi began in 2006 with Jean Nouvel’s Partner Architect Hala Wardé.
 

Oscar Niemeyer was born in 1907 in the hillside district of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there. Niemeyer’s architecture, conceived as lyrical sculpture, expands on the principles and innovations of Le Corbusier to become a kind of free-form sculpture.

In 1938-39 he designed the Brazilian Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair in collaboration with Lucio Costa. His celebrated career began to blossom with his involvement with the Ministry of Education and Health (1945) in Rio de Janeiro. Niemeyer’s mentor, Lucio Costa, architect, urban planner, and renowned pioneer of Modern architecture in Brazil, led a group of young architects who collaborated with Le Corbusier to design the building which became a landmark of modern Brazilian architecture. It was while Niemeyer was working on this project that he met the mayor of Brazil's wealthiest state, Juscelino Kubitschek, who would later become President of Brazil. As President, he appointed Niemeyer in 1956 to be the chief architect of Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, his designs complementing Lucio Costa’s overall plans. The designs for many buildings in Brasilia would occupy much of his time for many years.

"As an architect," he states, "my concern in Brasilia was to find a structural solution that would characterize the city's architecture. So I did my very best in the structures, trying to make them different with their columns narrow, so narrow that the palaces would seem to barely touch the ground. And I set them apart from the facades, creating an empty space through which, as I bent over my work table, I could see myself walking, imagining their forms and the different resulting points of view they would provoke.

Internationally, he collaborated with Le Corbusier again on the design for the United Nations Headquarters (1947-53) in New York, contributing significantly to the siting and final design of the buildings. His own residence (1953) in Rio de Janeiro has become a landmark. In the 1950s, he designed an Aeronautical Research Center near Sao Paulo. In Europe, he undertook an office building for Renault and the Communist Party Headquarters (1965) both in Paris, a cultural centre for Le Havre (1972), and in Italy, the Mondadori Editorial Office (1968) in Milan and the FATA Office Building (1979) in Turin. In Algiers, he designed the Zoological Gardens, the University of Constantine, and the Foreign Office.

Snøhetta is an integrated architecture, landscape, and interior design company based in Oslo, Norway, and New York City, formed in 1989 and led by principals Craig Dykers and Kjetil Thorsen. The firm, which is named after one of Norway's highest mountain peaks, has approximately 100 staff members working on projects around the world. The practice pursues a collaborative, transdisciplinary approach, with people from multiple professions working together to explore diverse perspectives on each project.

Snøhetta has completed a number of critically acclaimed cultural projects, including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt; the National Opera and Ballet in Oslo, Norway; and the Lillehammer Art Museum in Norway. Current projects include the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion at the World Trade Center site in New York.

In 2004 Snøhetta received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and in 2009 the firm was honored with the Mies van der Rohe Award. Snøhetta is the only company to have twice won the World Architecture Award for best cultural building, in 2002 for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and in 2008 for the National Opera and Ballet in Oslo.

Snøhetta