Architecture students undergo pressure for the most meagre things, whether it is the jury or the exams, even the submissions every studio class. It must just be normal to pull all-nighters every night and still turn up to juries and events on time and always looking fresh. Now, on the other hand, there are quite a few famous architects who somehow have managed to dodge all this and come up to be where they are today without having the official qualification for architecture. They don’t have any architectural degree and yet are accomplished in what they do. Not to mention to those who pay tons of money to have one but just the fact that sometimes passion and faith in work does get you places. It is common for any student to think about the first-class degree to be one of the top architects and that is the reason to put themselves in so much pain for years, sometimes it is about your ideas and the ability to make things happen.
Here are 10 architects who are famous, successful and well accomplished without a degree in the field.
1. Frank Lloyd Wright | Qualification for Architecture
A man who was, given the title of ‘the greatest American architect’. He did not have any official architecture degree although his work surely made up for it. It is not that he was never enrolled, in school or university but, because of circumstances, he dropped out in 1956. Although, he does have a civil engineering course to him. He moved soon enough to start his practical work as an assistant architect, he took some chances and with his exclusive qualities he did do a good job at firms and they became a basis for his own. He has his own thinking about formal education and, very famously is known by many, in 1955, he stated, “Education, of course, is always, based on what was. Education shows you what has been and leaves you to take the deduction as to what may be. Education, as we pursue it, cannot prophesy and does not.”
2. Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier owns most of his current architectural progress to those teachers who taught him and to those inspiring ones who pushed him in this direction. He also read a lot of books which too became an advancing platform for him. He never took up any formal education and learnt most of it from travelling, reading and working at practitioners. He too did a little bit of teaching in the field. It was in destiny for him to be in the field, and he did achieve a great deal.
3. Buckminster Fuller | Qualification for Architecture
He is one the oldest architects we know about and surely one of those with the greatest invention, the dome, it becomes more and more popular in the architecture study over time. He eventually did go to university in Harvard, of the most reputed but was fired, not once but twice. He revealed as to why it was so. After the death of his father he was not considered of equal class in university and ended up skipping class and it happened again but then world war struck and he could not return back.
4. Luis Barragan
A Pritzker prize winning Mexican architect whose work is minimalistic, mystic and emotional, with colours. He has graduated with a civil engineering degree and tried to get one in architecture but was unable to do so. His works in the early times and even later consist of many private homes, he only took up the additional course to be considered an architect.
5. Tadao Ando | Qualification for Architecture
This Japanese architect did not take formal education not because he didn’t want to but because he could not afford to. This says something about his dream and the faith and passion he had for architecture. Most of his education is derived from his own studies of old buildings and the local carpenters and some mathematicians. He was formerly a professional boxer. He is also a Pritzker prize winning architect and opened up his own firm at the young age of twenty-eight.
6. Peter Zumthor
A Pritzker prize winner born to a cabinet maker in Switzerland. He too followed his father’s footsteps and did cabinet making for four years eventually joining arts and crafts school where he did his education. Even after doing his formal education in the fine arts he ended up being an architect, so essentially, he has no architectural degree and yet is well-known and very proficient with his work.
7. Louis Sullivan
A man who discovered the phrase ‘form follows function’, too did not receive any formal education. He was studying in MIT before he grew impatient and withdrew, he thought of education to be suppressed and wanted more freedom with his work. Today his ideologies are the basis for upcoming designers.
8. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Qualification for Architecture
In lieu of his formal education the world-famous architect, designed his own home at the age of twenty-one. So young and yet so talented, he continually practiced or worked alone to perfect his craft. There are more than projects that can be identified from afar to be his. He was simple, elegant and up to the point, something a lot of future architects aspire to be. He created his own curriculum which is still currently taught in Illinois Institute of Technology.
9. Eileen Gray
Although Irish furniture designer and architect Eileen Gray took painting lessons at the Slade School of Fine Art, her formal training became sparing and infrequent. She instead seemed to glide into opportunities, turning into stimulated through her surroundings. In later decades, and in the long run created numerous exquisite architectural works, which include the Tempe à Pailla in the French Riviera.
10. Carlo Scarpa | Qualification for Architecture
The Italian master acknowledged for his wonderful method to layout and build, attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Venice, from which he graduated with a non-professional Professor in Architectural Drawing degree in 1926. Refusing to take a seat down the desired expert exam, he becomes consequently constrained from training architecture without associating himself with some other architect. He commenced his profession at the Royal Superior Institute of Architecture, Venice, coaching architectural drawing. It became simplest after the Second World War that Scarpa acquired a reputation as an architect, most drastically for the 1964 upkeep of the Museo Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy.
