The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Engineering,
#11051
Nicholas Hawksmoor
1661 - 1736 (75 years)
Nicholas Hawksmoor was an English architect. He was a leading figure of the English Baroque style of architecture in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Hawksmoor worked alongside the principal architects of the time, Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, and contributed to the design of some of the most notable buildings of the period, including St Paul's Cathedral, Wren's City of London churches, Greenwich Hospital, Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. Part of his work has been correctly attributed to him only relatively recently, and his influence has reached several poets and...
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William Pereira
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
William Leonard Pereira was an American architect from Chicago, Illinois, who was noted for his futuristic designs of landmark buildings such as the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. Remarkably prolific, he worked out of Los Angeles, and was known for his love of science fiction and expensive cars, but mostly for his unmistakable style of architecture, which helped define the look of mid-20th century America.
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Hassan Fathy
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Hassan Fathy was a noted Egyptian architect who pioneered appropriate technology for building in Egypt, especially by working to reestablish the use of adobe and traditional mud construction as opposed to western building designs, material configurations, and lay-outs. Fathy was recognized with the Aga Khan Chairman's Award for Architecture in 1980. In 2017, Google celebrated Fathy with a Google Doodle for "pioneering new methods [in architecture], respecting tradition [Egyptian heritage and tradition], and valuing all walks of life".
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Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban
1633 - 1707 (74 years)
Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Seigneur de Vauban, later Marquis de Vauban , commonly referred to as Vauban , was a French military engineer and Marshal of France who worked under Louis XIV. He is generally considered the greatest engineer of his time, and one of the most important in European military history.
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Friedrich August Stüler
1800 - 1865 (65 years)
Friedrich August Stüler was an influential Prussian architect and builder. His masterpiece is the Neues Museum in Berlin, as well as the dome of the triumphal arch of the main portal of the Berliner Schloss.
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Theodor Fischer
1862 - 1938 (76 years)
Theodor Fischer was a German architect and teacher. Career Fischer planned public housing projects for the city of Munich beginning in 1893. He was the joint founder and first chairman of the Deutscher Werkbund , as well as member of the German version of the Garden city movement. In 1909, Fischer accepted a position as professor for architecture at the Technical University of Munich.
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Nikolay Dollezhal
1899 - 2000 (101 years)
Nikolay Antonovich Dollezhal was a Russian engineer of Czech origin whose career was spent in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons and later played an influential role in developing the commercial nuclear power industry of Russia.
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Ernesto Basile
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Ernesto Basile was an Italian architect and an exponent of modernisme and Liberty style, the Italian variant of Art Nouveau. His style was known for its eclectic fusion of ancient, medieval and modern elements.
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Stanford White
1853 - 1906 (53 years)
Stanford White was an American architect. He was also a partner in the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, one of the most significant Beaux-Arts firms. He designed many houses for the wealthy, in addition to numerous civic, institutional, and religious buildings. His temporary Washington Square Arch was so popular that he was commissioned to design a permanent one. His design principles embodied the "American Renaissance".
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Nikolai Kolli
1894 - 1966 (72 years)
Nikolai Dzhemsovich Kolli was a Soviet and Russian Modernist—Constructivist architect, architectural functionary, and city planner in the Soviet Union. History Kolli was born in Moscow, and studied at the Imperial Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and then at the Leninist VKhUTEMAS in Moscow.
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Walter Burley Griffin
1876 - 1937 (61 years)
Walter Burley Griffin was an American architect and landscape architect. He designed Canberra, Australia's capital city, the New South Wales towns of Griffith and Leeton, and the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag.
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Richard Norman Shaw
1831 - 1912 (81 years)
Richard Norman Shaw RA , also known as Norman Shaw, was a British architect who worked from the 1870s to the 1900s, known for his country houses and for commercial buildings. He is considered to be among the greatest of British architects; his influence on architectural style was strongest in the 1880s and 1890s.
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Oskar Kokoschka
1886 - 1980 (94 years)
Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expressionist movement.
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Mikhail Tikhonravov
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
Mikhail Klavdievich Tikhonravov was a Soviet engineer who was a pioneer of spacecraft design and rocketry. Mikhail Tikhonravov was born in Vladimir, Russia. He attended the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy from 1922 to 1925, where he was exposed to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's ideas of spaceflight. After graduation and until 1931 worked in several aircraft industries and was engaged in developing gliders. From 1931 and on, devoted himself to the development of the field of rocketry. In 1932, he joined Group for the Study of Reactive Motion , as one of the four brigade leaders. His brigade built the G...
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Henry Hornbostel
1867 - 1961 (94 years)
Henry Hornbostel was an American architect and educator. Hornbostel designed more than 225 buildings, bridges, and monuments in the United States. Twenty-two of his designs are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including the Oakland City Hall in Oakland, California and the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum and University Club in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Richard Trevithick
1771 - 1833 (62 years)
Richard Trevithick was a British inventor and mining engineer. The son of a mining captain, and born in the mining heartland of Cornwall, Trevithick was immersed in mining and engineering from an early age. He was an early pioneer of steam-powered road and rail transport, and his most significant contributions were the development of the first high-pressure steam engine and the first working railway steam locomotive. The world's first locomotive-hauled railway journey took place on 21 February 1804, when Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren ...
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Charles Alton Ellis
1876 - 1949 (73 years)
Charles Alton Ellis was a professor, structural engineer and mathematician who was chiefly responsible for the structural design of the Golden Gate Bridge. Because of a dispute with Joseph Strauss, he was not recognized for his work when the bridge opened in 1937. His contributions were ultimately recognized at the bridge in a plaque installed in 2012.
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Ivan Nikolaev
1901 - 1979 (78 years)
Ivan Sergeyevich Nikolaev was a Soviet architect and educator, notable for his late 1920s constructivist architecture and later work in industrial architecture. Life and career Born in Voronezh, Nikolaev trained at the Moscow State Technical University under Viktor Vesnin and Aleksandr Kuznetsov, graduating in 1925. His work prior to 1928 was generally unnoticed .
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Carlo Scarpa
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Carlo Scarpa was an Italian architect, influenced by the materials, landscape and the history of Venetian culture, and by Japan. Scarpa translated his interests in history, regionalism, invention, and the techniques of the artist and craftsman into ingenious glass and furniture design.
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Eugen Sänger
1905 - 1964 (59 years)
Eugen Sänger was an Austrian aerospace engineer best known for his contributions to lifting body and ramjet technology. Early career Sänger was born in the former mining town of Preßnitz , near Komotau in Bohemia, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied civil engineering at the Technical Universities of Graz and Vienna. As a student, he came in contact with Hermann Oberth's book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen , which inspired him to change from studying civil engineering to aeronautics. He also joined Germany's amateur rocket movement, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt whi...
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Bertram Goodhue
1869 - 1924 (55 years)
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue was an American architect celebrated for his work in Gothic Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival design. He also designed notable typefaces, including Cheltenham and Merrymount for the Merrymount Press. Later in life, Goodhue freed his architectural style with works like El Fureidis in Montecito, one of the three estates designed by Goodhue.
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Basil Spence
1907 - 1976 (69 years)
Sir Basil Urwin Spence, was a Scottish architect, most notably associated with Coventry Cathedral in England and the Beehive in New Zealand, but also responsible for numerous other buildings in the Modernist/Brutalist style.
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Ralph Adams Cram
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Ralph Adams Cram was a prolific and influential American architect of collegiate and ecclesiastical buildings, often in the Gothic Revival style. Cram & Ferguson and Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson are partnerships in which he worked. Cram was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
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Leonid Ramzin
1887 - 1948 (61 years)
Leonid Konstantinovich Ramzin was a Soviet thermal engineer, and the inventor of a type of flow-through boiler known as the straight-flow boiler, or Ramzin boiler. He was a laureate of the Stalin Prize First-Class, which he received in 1943.
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Claude-Louis Navier
1785 - 1836 (51 years)
Claude-Louis Navier was a French mechanical engineer, affiliated with the French government, and a physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. The Navier–Stokes equations refer eponymously to him, with George Gabriel Stokes.
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Charles Garnier
1825 - 1898 (73 years)
Jean-Louis Charles Garnier was a French architect, perhaps best known as the architect of the Palais Garnier and the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. Early life Charles Garnier was born Jean-Louis Charles Garnier on 6 November 1825 in Paris, on the Rue Mouffetard, in the present-day 5th arrondissement. His father, Jean André Garnier, 1796–1865, who was originally from Sarthe, a department of the French region of Pays de la Loire, had worked as a blacksmith, wheelwright, and coachbuilder before settling down in Paris to work in a horse-drawn carriage rental business. He married Felicia Colle, daughter of...
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Giotto
1267 - 1337 (70 years)
Giotto di Bondone , known mononymously as Giotto and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period. Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature" and of his publicly recognized "talent and excellence". Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as making a decisive break from the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great a...
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Charles Dickinson West
1847 - 1908 (61 years)
Charles Dickinson West was an Irish mechanical engineer and naval architect, who worked for many years at the Imperial College of Engineering, in Meiji era Japan. Biography West was born in Dublin, Ireland as the eldest son of The Very Reverend John West, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, and graduated with a degree in civil engineering from Trinity College Dublin in 1869. He worked at Bergenhead Steel Company in Great Britain for five years, followed by positions in other forms where he gained experience in shipbuilding, steel mills and steam power.
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William Chambers
1723 - 1796 (73 years)
Sir William Chambers was a Swedish-born British architect. Among his best-known works are Somerset House, and the pagoda at Kew. Chambers was a founder member of the Royal Academy. Biography William Chambers was born on 23 February 1723 in Gothenburg, Sweden, to a Scottish merchant father.
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Ferdinand Redtenbacher
1809 - 1863 (54 years)
Ferdinand Jakob Redtenbacher is regarded as the founder of science-based mechanical engineering. Life Redtenbacher, son of an ironmonger from Steyr, first went through an apprenticeship in commerce and accounting. After a short interlude as technical illustrator in the "Baudirektion" in Linz, he attended the Polytechnikum in Vienna from 1825 until 1829. He stayed there until 1834 as an assistant to Johann Arzberger. In 1835, he accepted an invitation to become a professor at the Höhere Industrieschule in Zürich, where he taught mathematics and geometry. In 1841 he finally became professor ...
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Marion Mahony Griffin
1871 - 1961 (90 years)
Marion Mahony Griffin was an American architect and artist. She was one of the first licensed female architects in the world, and is considered an original member of the Prairie School. Her work in the United States developed and expanded the American Prairie School, and her work in India and Australia reflected Prairie School ideals of indigenous landscape and materials in the newly formed democracies. The scholar Deborah Wood stated that Griffin "did the drawings people think of when they think of Frank Lloyd Wright ." According to architecture critic, Reyner Banham, Griffin was "America’s...
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William Butterfield
1814 - 1900 (86 years)
William Butterfield was a British Gothic Revival architect and associated with the Oxford Movement . He is noted for his use of polychromy. Biography William Butterfield was born in London in 1814. His parents were strict non-conformistss who ran a chemist's shop in the Strand. He was one of nine children and was educated at a local school. At the age of 16, he was apprenticed to Thomas Arber, a builder in Pimlico, who later became bankrupt. He studied architecture under E. L. Blackburne . From 1838 to 1839, he was an assistant to Harvey Eginton, an architect in Worcester, where he became articled.
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Pietro da Cortona
1596 - 1669 (73 years)
Pietro da Cortona was an Italian Baroque painter and architect. Along with his contemporaries and rivals Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, he was one of the key figures in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture. He was also an important designer of interior decorations.
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Euripides
480 BC - 406 BC (74 years)
Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete . There are many fragments of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declinedhe became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient...
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Capability Brown
1716 - 1783 (67 years)
Lancelot Brown , more commonly known as Capability Brown, was an English gardener and landscape architect, who remains the most famous figure in the history of the English landscape garden style. He is remembered as "the last of the great English 18th-century artists to be accorded his due" and "England's greatest gardener".
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Benjamin Henry Latrobe
1764 - 1820 (56 years)
Benjamin Henry Boneval Latrobe was an Anglo-American neoclassical architect who emigrated to the United States. He was one of the first formally trained, professional architects in the new United States, drawing on influences from his travels in Italy, as well as British and French Neoclassical architects such as Claude Nicolas Ledoux. In his thirties, he emigrated to the new United States and designed the United States Capitol, on "Capitol Hill" in Washington, D.C., as well as the Old Baltimore Cathedral or The Baltimore Basilica, . It is the first Cathedral constructed in the United States for any Christian denomination.
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William Fairbairn
1789 - 1874 (85 years)
Sir William Fairbairn, 1st Baronet of Ardwick was a Scottish civil engineer, structural engineer and shipbuilder. In 1854 he succeeded George Stephenson and Robert Stephenson to become the third president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
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Alfred Waterhouse
1830 - 1905 (75 years)
Alfred Waterhouse was an English architect, particularly associated with the Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, although he designed using other architectural styles as well. He is perhaps best known for his designs for Manchester Town Hall and the Natural History Museum in London, although he also built a wide variety of other buildings throughout the country. Besides his most famous public buildings he designed other town halls, the Manchester Assize buildings—bombed in World War II—and the adjacent Strangeways Prison. He also designed several hospitals, the most architecturally interesting being the Royal Infirmary Liverpool and University College Hospital London.
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Frank Furness
1839 - 1912 (73 years)
Frank Heyling Furness was an American architect of the Victorian era. He designed more than 600 buildings, most in the Philadelphia area, and is remembered for his diverse, muscular, often inordinately scaled buildings, and for his influence on the Chicago-based architect Louis Sullivan. Furness also received a Medal of Honor for bravery during the Civil War.
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Armas Lindgren
1874 - 1929 (55 years)
Armas Eliel Lindgren was Finnish architect, professor and painter. Biography Early life and career Armas Lindgren was born in Hämeenlinna on 28 November 1874. He studied architecture in the Polytechnical Institute of Helsinki, from where he graduated in 1897. While a student he collaborated with Josef Stenbäck and Gustaf Nyström, two well-known Finnish architects. He spent the 1898–1999 studying history of art and culture in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. In 1896 he founded with Herman Gesellius and Eliel Saarinen, an architectural firm named Gesellius, Lindgren, Saarinen.
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David B. Steinman
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
David Barnard Steinman was an American civil engineer. He was the designer of the Mackinac Bridge and many other notable bridges, and a published author. He grew up in New York City's lower Manhattan, and lived with the ambition of making his mark on the Brooklyn Bridge that he lived under. In 1906 he earned a bachelor's degree from City College and in 1909, a Master of Arts from Columbia University and a Doctorate in 1911. He also received an honorary Doctor of Science in Engineering on 15 April 1952 from degree mill Sequoia University, but would distance himself from it soon after a 1957 inquiry raised doubts over its legitimacy, and did not mention the qualifications in his biographies.
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Elie Carafoli
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Elie Carafoli was an accomplished Romanian engineer and aircraft designer. He is considered a pioneering contributor to the field of Aerodynamics. Biography First years, education Carafoli was of Aromanian descent. In 1915, he left Greece for Bitola, and then Bucharest, where he studied at Gheorghe Lazăr High School. In 1919 he entered University Politehnica of Bucharest, graduating with a degree in electrical engineering. He pursued his studies at the University of Paris, while also working at the Institut Aérotechnique in Saint-Cyr-l'École, France. He obtained a Ph.D. in 1928, with a thesi...
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Alfred Stieglitz
1864 - 1946 (82 years)
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
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Juan Nakpil
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Juan Nakpil was born on May 26, 1899. Over his career, he rose to prominence as one of the most distinguished architects in the Philippines. He received the honor of National Artist for architecture for his contributions to the field. Nakpil received a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Kansas before studying architecture at the Fontainbleu School of Fine Arts. Nakpil founded an architectural firm in 1930. He is credited with bringing modern architecture to the Philippines through his work. Nakpil completed many of his projects in the 1930s and 40s. He co-founded the Philippine College of Design in 1941, but World War II brought an end to the school.
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Lev Rudnev
1885 - 1956 (71 years)
Lev Vladimirovich Rudnev was a Soviet architect, and a leading practitioner of Stalinist architecture. Biography Rudnev was born to the family of a school teacher in the town of Opochka . He graduated from the Riga Realschule and entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg . At the Academy he studied painting under Leon Benois and architecture under Ivan Fomin. From 1911 Rudnev was a success in various architectural competitions, and in 1915 he became a certified specialist in the art of architecture.
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Harold Stephen Black
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Harold Stephen Black was an American electrical engineer, who revolutionized the field of applied electronics by inventing the negative feedback amplifier in 1927. To some, his invention is considered the most important breakthrough of the twentieth century in the field of electronics, since it has a wide area of application. This is because all electronic devices are inherently nonlinear, but they can be made substantially linear with the application of negative feedback. Negative feedback works by sacrificing gain for higher linearity . By sacrificing gain, it also has an additional effect of increasing the bandwidth of the amplifier.
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Roman Klein
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Roman Ivanovich Klein , born Robert Julius Klein, was a Russian architect and educator, best known for his Neoclassical Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Klein, an eclectic, was one of the most prolific architects of his period, second only to Fyodor Schechtel. In the 1880s-1890s, he practiced Russian Revival and Neo-Gothic exteriors; in the 1900s, his knowledge of Roman and Byzantine classical architecture allowed him to integrate into the Neoclassical revival trend of that period.
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Donato Bramante
1444 - 1514 (70 years)
Donato Bramante , born as Donato di Pascuccio d'Antonio and also known as Bramante Lazzari, was an Italian architect and painter. He introduced Renaissance architecture to Milan and the High Renaissance style to Rome, where his plan for St. Peter's Basilica formed the basis of the design executed by Michelangelo. His Tempietto marked the beginning of the High Renaissance in Rome when Pope Julius II appointed him to build a sanctuary over the spot where Peter was martyred.
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Emery Roth
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Emery Roth was an American architect of Hungarian-Jewish descent who designed many New York City hotels and apartment buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, incorporating Beaux-Arts and Art Deco details. His sons continued in the family enterprise, largely expanding the firm under the name Emery Roth & Sons.
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Piero Portaluppi
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Piero Portaluppi was an Italian architect. Biography Pietro Portaluppi was born in Milan, son of the engineer Oreste Portaluppi and wife Luisa Gadda. He graduated in 1905 from the Istituto Tecnico Carlo Cattaneo and registered at the Politecnico, studying with and Carlo Calzecchi. During this time, he worked as a caricaturist with the satirical newspapers Il Babau, A quel paese, and Guerin Meschino.
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