My client is not in a hurry
Antoni GAUDI took charge of the Sagrada Família in 1883 and worked on it for forty-three years, the last decade or so to the exclusion of everything else, living on the site. About a quarter of it was standing when he was knocked down by a tram in 1926. Mistaken for a beggar because of his clothes, he was taken to a pauper's hospital and died three days later.
Asked about the pace, he is supposed to have said that his client was not in a hurry. The building is still going up — funded by visitors, interrupted by a civil war that destroyed his models and by a pandemic, and worked on by architects reconstructing his intentions from fragments. It has been under construction for over 140 years, which is longer than most of the cathedrals it is compared to took.
The architect who never saw it finished
Jørn UTZON won the Sydney Opera House competition in 1957 with a drawing that the judges pulled out of the rejected pile. Nobody, including him, knew how to build the shells; it took years and an eventual insight that they could all be cut from the surface of a single imaginary sphere.
In 1966, with the exterior nearly done, a new state government withheld his fees and stripped his authority. He resigned, left Australia, and never went back. The interiors were finished by others to different designs. The building was budgeted at seven million Australian dollars and cost 102 million. He was eventually reconciled with the building in his eighties, from Denmark, by post — and it is now one of the most recognisable landmarks on earth.
Slogans get built by people who did not read them
Le CORBUSIER called a house a machine for living in. MIES van der Rohe is remembered for less is more. Both were arguments made in a specific fight against Victorian clutter, by designers who cared enormously about materials and light and spent fortunes getting a detail right.
Both were then used to justify a great deal of cheap post-war housing by people who took the slogan and skipped the care, because concrete towers were fast and inexpensive. The gap between an idea and what gets built in its name is most of twentieth-century architecture's reputation problem. Corbusier's own buildings are mostly listed and beloved; the estates built in his general direction were mostly demolished.
If you seek his monument, look around you
Christopher WREN is buried in St Paul's Cathedral under a plain slab, and the inscription nearby reads, in Latin, that if you seek his monument you should look about you. He designed the building above it and more than fifty other churches after the Great Fire of 1666 — a career created entirely by a catastrophe.
The rest of the grid is the long argument about what a building is for. PALLADIO and NASH and PUGIN; Frank LLOYD WRIGHT, AALTO, SAARINEN and NIEMEYER; and the moderns — FOSTER, ROGERS, PIANO, GEHRY, PEI, CALATRAVA, LIBESKIND, STIRLING and Zaha HADID, the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, who spent years being told her drawings were unbuildable before the engineering caught up with them.