Rulers of Architecture
12" Wooden Ruler made in U.S.A. of American-grown basswood.
A combination of art and science, architecture affects all of us who spend time in buildings, which means pretty much everyone. As an art form Ancient Greece, Rome and the Islamic World have had the greatest influence on the buildings that we inhabit today. As a science, technology has evolved tremendously since those early days.
The evolution of style is more apparent in architecture than in most other disciplines, witness the evolution from Romanesque to Gothic, first encountered with Abbot Suger (1081-1151) at Saint Denis near Paris, and then on to the Renaissance in Florence, Italy, where Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) built his magnificent dome atop the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.
Our ruler moves to the Baroque in England, exemplified by Inigo Jones (1573-1652) and Christopher Wren (1632-1723) and then on to the revival styles which dominate American architecture of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the 20th century, a combination of new technologies and new ideas about light and health led to a modernization of styles, typified by Walter Gropius (1883-1969) and The Bauhaus. A great work of architecture can still revive a city, witness the revitalization of Bilbao, Spain, after the construction there of the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry (1929- ).
We often update our rulers, and have recently included the prolific Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid (1950-2016), the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which she did in 2004. Two other recent additions to Rulers of Architecture are Sir Norman Foster (1935- ) who built 30 St Mary Axe in London, a building affectionately called "The Gherkin" due to its pickle-shape, and Spanish star Santiago Calatrava (1951- ).
The dates listed are the architect’s birth and death years. We also list one detail about each of them, which might be one of their buildings, their nationality or a style that they worked in.
The “head” image is of Swiss architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965), whose real name was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, and who was as influential as an urban planner as he was as an architect.
If you like this ruler, you might also be interested in Rulers of Art, or Great Women Rulers of Art.