Which architects and designers are the most clicked on the internet? The ranking of the 15 most searched of them on Google over the last three months, in English and worldwide, confirms some assumptions but is also filled with surprises. When investigated on the basis of specific questions, the simple list of names lends itself to considerations of various nature. One can observe, for instance, the balance between the living (eight) and the departed (seven), the dramatic gender gap between two women and 13 men, but also the variety of their geographical origins, from no less than 10 countries: in order of appearance the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Finland, Japan, Denmark and Mexico. A more daring exercise, though, would try to reorganize this ranking borrowing an interpretational tool from the history of architecture, that is the subdivision in currents, movements, trends. The mere summary turns into a sort of grand prix – of Formula One, not de Rome – an impossible race between pilots from different generations, made of unexpected over-takings, photo-finish arrivals, fulfilled promises and cruel disappointments.
The world’s most Googled architects and designers
Who’s the most popular of them all? A list with many surprises and just as many confirmations.
Photo Chiara Becattini
source Wikicommons / lachrimae72
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, 1997. From Domus 798, November 1997
Photo Richard Bryant/Arcaid
Photo courtesy of L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui. Domus 511 / June 1972; view internal pages
Photo Nigel Young
Photo Michel Denancé
Foto Alvar Aalto Musuem, Rune Snellman
Photo Alvar Aalto Museum, Martti Kapanen
Photo Studio Casali, Domus Archive
Photo Paola De Pietri, from Domus 763 september 1994
Courtesy Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church
Photo Rasmus Hjortshoj, from Domus 1036 june 2019
Courtesy Bjarke Ingels Group
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- Alessandro Benetti
- 29 September 2021
In first position Zaha Hadid takes the lead of the deconstructivist group, followed by Frank Gehry, fourth overall and the most searched of living architects. No sign of Daniel Libeskind.
Frank Lloyd Wright, runner-up, establishes himself as the most clicked modernist master, passing Le Corbusier, on the lower step of the podium. Oscar Niemeyer’s snow-white carioca modernism earns a good placement in fifth position, Alvar Aalto’s organic modernism barely makes it into the top ten, and Luis Barragan modern Mexico is 15th.
The great absentee of this cordate is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Three architects that relate to the high-tech movement, or at least share an interest in the technological component architecture, are able to qualify: Norman Foster in sixth position, Renzo Piano in eight position and Santiago Calatrava in 12th position. The team is completed by designers Philippe Starck, seventh, and Neri Oxman, 13th, the evergreen Antoni Gaudí, ninth, the poetic postmodern Tadao Ando, 11th, and the superpop post-postmodern Bjarke Ingels, 14th.
The reasons behind this rankings are manifold and very complex, not necessarily relating to the designers’ quality and to the value of their works, nor this is not the place to elaborate on this issue.
Nonetheless, at the end of this first overview, one can suggest that it would be interesting to check the variations of these figures over time, to understand how they are impacted by the character’s fame on the long run, taste fluctuations in the medium term and the news of events directly involving them.
Zaha Hadid’s first position is not a complete surprise but still it gives food for thought. Five years after she passed, the Iraqi-born architect remains at the very heart of the discourses on contemporary architecture, also thanks to the (hyper-)activity of her office Zaha Hadid Architects. The announcement of the arrival in Italy of the Hyperloop and the inauguration of Striatus Bridge – a prototype for a 3D-printed concrete bridge, exhibited in Venice as a side event to the 17th Architecture Biennale – have made headlines in summer 2021.
Hyperloop
Block Research Group, Zaha Hadid Architects, Striatus Bridge, Venezia, 2021.
It has already been four years since the large retrospective dedicated by New York’s MoMA to Frank Lloyd Wright, the master of organic architecture and the designer of the Kaufmann House and of the first Guggenheim Museum. His fame, though, doesn’t seem to be weakening, probably also thanks to the popularity and the continued success of the New York-based institution.
Casa Kaufmann
Guggenheim Museum, image from Domus 832, December 2000
Le Corbusier è il grande sconfitto di questa classifica. Maestro per eccellenza del modernismo europeo razionalista, il progettista della Villa Savoye di Poissy e dell’Unité d’habitation di Marsiglia deve cedere il passo al rivale americano “organico”. Chissà quanta amarezza gli avrebbe provocato, proprio a lui che passò una vita a comunicare le sue opere ancora prima che a costruirle.
View of the exhibition "Le Corbusier, Mesures de l'homme", Center Pompidou in Paris
Pavillon Espirit Nouveau, Paris
Frank Gehry’s architectures are flamboyant and over-the-top just as much as their creator. Since the times of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum and of Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, the buildings by the Californian architect keep fascinating, shocking and raising debate. Case in point, the Luma Tower, the new shiny headquarters of the Luma Foundation, inaugurated in Arles in 2021, has certainly caused a stir.
Photo Christian Richters
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, United States, 2003. From Domus 863, October 2003
Snow-white, curvy, sun-drenched, Oscar Niemeyer architectures-sculpture have always met the favor of a large audience, even when critics took a distance from the Brazilian master, stigmatizing the reduction of his experimental attitude to mere formalism, style with no research. Niemeyer’s fifth position within this ranking seems to confirm his quintessentially pop inclination.
Headquarters of the French Communist Party, Paris
Niemeyer Centre, Avilès
Extremely prolific and always active in the contemporary debate on architecture and the city, Norman Foster earns a well-deserved sixth place. More that his presence here, what is surprising is the absence of his peer, friend and rival Richard Rogers.
Foster + Partners, Pavillon Vieux Port, Marseille 2013
Foster + Partners, Buenos Aires Ciudad Casa de Gobierno, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Philippe Starck is the very first star in the history of his profession, a skilled designer but also a communicator and a public figure in all respects. Forty years after he started his career, in the heyday of the postmodern age, Starck keeps designing objects that make the news. He also participated in the 2021 Milan Design Week, where he presented the outdoor furniture collection Serengeti for Janus et Cie..
ANUS et Cie, Serengeti armchair
Juicy Salif Alessi, 1988
Renzo Piano is in many regards an atypical figure on the scene of world architecture. He stands out for his low-profile approach: he builds high-quality architectures, he actively participates in the debate on the transformations of the built environment, but he gently and decidedly rejects all forms of mediatization of his own self. This old-time moderation hasn’t prevented him from reaching the eight position in this ranking. Over the last few years, a lot has been said and written about his reconstruction of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa.
Morandi Bridge, Genoa
Renzo Piano Building Workshop, architects, in collaboration with Adamson Associates, The Shard, London Bridge Tower, London, United Kingdom, 2000-2012.
Born in 1852, Antoni Gaudí is the crew’s senior, the most “ancient” of all the architects of the ranking. The public success of the master of Catalan modernism, a declination of Art Nouveau, is tightly connected to the rise of Barcelona, where he lived and built most of his major works, as a tourist destination.
Palau de la Música Catalana, Barcelona
La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
Alvar Aalto has always been the most widely appreciated of the great modernists, also by non-specialists of architecture. Quite easily so: in fact, already in the 1920s he was advocating for a stronger organic relationship between architecture and nature, architecture and its user, while Le Corbusier speculated on machine-à-habiter, basically houses designed as cars. The Finnish master’s research themes are close to the sensibility of our age, engaged in the construction of new links between humankind and the environment.
Finalandia Hall, Helsinki, 1971
Pimio Chair, 1931
Domus’s Guest Editor for 2021, Tadao Ando is the only Japanese included in the ranking. The strong symbolic component of his architectures, as well as his capacity to narrate them in openly literary and poetic terms, might have contributed to his success online.
Bourse de Commerce, Paris
Teatrino of Palazzo Grassi, Venezia
Those years are long gone when, in the 1990s and even later, Santiago Calatrava’s works were amongst the few to actually make headlines, and cities all over the world would line up to secure a snow-white bridge sculpted by the Spanish designer. Calatrava, though, remains a protagonist of internet searches about architecture, even now that other and more colorful architectural icons are under the spotlight.
Station for the Lyon-Satolas TGV, Lyon 1994
Church of Saint Nicholas in New York
An architect and a scholar, Neri Oxman is the prototype of the successful contemporary researcher, who manages to profitably combine theoretical speculation and practical applications. With Mediated Matter, her team based at MIT’s Media Lab, she experiments particularly on materials, for instance perfecting organic composites that can replace plastic, such as the Aguahoja.
3D printing on glass
3D version of ancient death masks
The student has become the master. Rem Koolhaas, the behemoth of contemporary architecture, doesn’t make it into the ranking of the 15 most clicked designers, but his former protégé Bjarke Ingels does. The Scandinavian architecture’s enfant terrible has become an adult and is now the prototype of a contemporary star architect. The announces of his projects and realizations follow one another in quick succession: the O-Tower in Hangzhou is amongst the most recent.
CopenHill, Copenaghen
Oppo headquarters, Hangzhou, China
Colorful and sophisticated, exotic but soothing, photogenic and ready for Instagram long before the social media platform was launched: these are the works of Luis Barragan. It is not by chance if the Mexican architect earns, though by the skin of his teeth, the last available position of this ranking.
From Domus 889
From Domus 321