Paolo Soleri was born in 1919 in Turin, Italy.  He received highest honors from the Politecnico di Torino in 1956 and came to the U.S. in 1947 to spend a year and a half at Taliesin West in Arizona and Taliesin in Wisconsin with Frank Lloyd Wright. Soleri returned to Italy in 1950 where he [...]

Ieoh Ming Pei was born in Guangzhou, China in 1917 and raised in Hong Kong and Shanghai.  Better known as I.M. Pei he moved to the U.S. in 1935.  His mentors were Le Corbusier who he met while attending MIT in 1935 and Frank Lloyd Wright.  While atending  MIT and Harvard he befriended Walter Gropius and Marcel [...]

Julia Morgan is best known as the architect who built the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California for Randolf William Hearst the newspaper magnate.   Julia was born in San Francisco, CA  in 1872 and raised in nearby Oakland just across the Bay.  She designed over 700 buildings in her career just in California.  Throughout her [...]

Born in New York City, Bernard Ralph Maybeck was the son of a German immigrant.  He studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, France and moved to Berkeley, California in 1892.  At the University of California, Berkeley he taught architecture to such famous students as Julia Morgan and William Wurster.  He was awarded [...]