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MANILA, Philippines - Who is the architect that designed the Museum of Art (1980-1983) in Atlanta, Georgia, the Museum for the Decorative Arts (1979-1984) in Frankfurt, Germany, and the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa?

Born in Newark, New Jersey, on Oct. 12, 1934, he studied architecture at Cornell University, where he graduated in 1957. During a trip to Europe in 1959 he sought to join the office of his early idol, the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. Although he was able to meet Le Corbusier in Paris, the master would not hire him, or any other American, at that time, since Le Corbusier believed that several major commissions throughout his career had been lost because of Americans. He returned to New York where he worked briefly for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and then for about three years with Marcel Breuer, a product of the German Bauhaus and former partner of Walter Gropius.

During his early career in New York, he was an architect by day and abstract expressionist painter at night. For a period of time he shared a studio with his close friend Frank Stella. He eventually gave up painting to devote himself more fully to architecture, although he continued to work on collages occasionally.

In 1963 he left Breuer to establish his own practice in New York. From 1963 to 1973 he taught at Cooper Union in New York and was a visiting critic at a number of other institutions. He began to meet with a group called CASE (Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment), whose discussions of each other’s buildings and projects resulted in the 1972 book Five Architects, featuring the work of Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and himself. Despite his assertion that this was never a unified group, the “New York Five” were identified with a return to the heroic early period of the European International Style, particularly the buildings of Le Corbusier during the 1920s and 1930s.

He first gained attention with his white and immaculate neo-Corbusian villas set in nature, such as his Smith House (1965-1967) at Darien, Connecticut. With its exterior walls of vertical wooden siding, this crisply composed, compact house is a modern New England house, following a genre established earlier by Gropius and Breuer. A central theme of this architect is seen in the clear separation between the enclosed, private rooms of the entrance front and the much more open main living area at the back, which is here organized into a tall vertical space, glazed on three sides, allowing a panoramic view of Long Island Sound. He stated that his “fundamental concerns are space, form, light, and how to make them.”

One of his most striking residences is the Douglas House (1971-1973) at Harbor Springs, Michigan. Perched on a steep bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, this tall, vertically organized, white and machine-like villa is dramatically juxtaposed with the unspoiled greenery of its idyllic site. He preferred the purity of white, his favorite color, for most of his buildings. White boldly contrasts with nature, yet it constantly responds, through reflection, to surrounding colors and the changing quality of light.

One of his first major non-residential commissions was the Bronx Development Center (1970-1977) in New York for mentally and physically challenged children. Built on an unpromising site of wasteland between a parkway and railroad tracks, he chose to turn inward to a spatially rich courtyard. His approach to such an institution was to create “a city in microcosm.” This was the first of his buildings to be built with walls of metal panels.

The tour de force of his work of the 1970s was the Atheneum (1975-1979) at New Harmony, Indiana. This visitors’ and community center serves a village which was an early 19th-century utopian community, first for George Rapp and his Harmony Society, and later for Robert Owen and his Owenites. The building stands at the entrance to the town on a miniature, Acropolis-like, knoll near the Wabash River. Responding to both the grid of the town and the edge of the river, he designed his building on two overlapping grids skewed five degrees from one another. This resulted in an impression of spatial contraction and expansion by means of ramps and stairs in dramatic vertical spaces lit by abundant natural light. He reached a new level of complexity in his neo-Corbusian language, which went well beyond the more static and Classical sensibility of Le Corbusier himself. This Baroque manipulation of space and light through complex form was partially inspired by his studies in 1973 as resident architect at the American Academy in Rome, where he was especially intrigued by the Baroque architecture of Italy and southern Germany.

By the early 1980s, he had emerged as a major architect of museums. His High Museum of Art (1980-1983) in Atlanta, Georgia, contains the drama of a four-story atrium with a ramp ascending back and forth along a quadrant curve. He also built a major addition to the Museum for the Decorative Arts (1979-1984) at Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where the early 19th-century villa of the original museum serves as one quadrant block in his expansion and the source for the dimensions of the additions. For the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, he skillfully appended three small additions (1982-1984) to a 1948 Eliel Saarinen building which had been added to in 1965 by I. M. Pei.

In 1984, the year he turned 50, he received the prestigious Pritzker Prize and was selected to be the architect for a new Getty complex in Los Angeles, which included the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Getty Conservation Institute, and a new museum building. By the mid-1980s, it was clear that this exceedingly consistent architect, who had shown that modern architecture is very much alive, had become one of the major architects of his day.

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Last week’s question: Who is the architect that designed London’s iconic Swiss Re tower, nicknamed the Gherkin for its tall, rounded, pickle-like shape?

Answer: Norman Foster

Winner: Abelardo Sampang of Makati City

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