To this day, architecture is a male-dominated field. Still, women are making headway with their amazing contributions to the world of architecture across the globe. While many of the incredible women-designed structures mentioned had a male co-designer, the fact stands that women’s design skills are a force to be reckoned with. It’s time to celebrate their accomplishments by bringing light to the women who have helped make our day-to-day lives more aesthetically pleasing with their stunning architectural contributions.
MAAT Museum – Lisbon, Portugal
If you’re ever in Lisbon, be prepared to be stunned by British architect Amanda Levete’s MAAT museum, a structure covered in 15,000 white ceramic tiles and inspired by the rippling Tagus River. In fact, the museum sits right on the bank of that river. It is the most prominent piece of industrial architecture in Portugal.
Levete is the head of the architecture firm AL_A, formerly Amanda Levete Architecture. She won the Stirling Prize in 1999 and the Jane Drew Prize for women in architecture in 2018 for her creative and innovative work.
Aqua Tower – Chicago, Illinois
Jeanne Gang is changing the game for women in a male-dominated field. Gang was the lead architect of the Aqua Tower in Chicago, which hovers at 859 feet tall and is the tallest building in the world designed by a woman.
Studio Gang, Gang’s architecture firm, was contracted to design Aqua Tower, built in 2010, and its unique and eye-catching structure is a response to the dense conditions of a large city. The building creates community by being home to offices, apartments, condos, and a hotel, all connected by stunning terraces. Plus it’s topped off with a green roof.
Museum Garage – Miami, Florida
Architecture firm WORKac’s Amale Andraos was the principal designer of their part of Museum Garage. Located in Miami’s Design District, Museum Garage’s total design is a collection of work by five designers. Andraos’ section is called Ant Farm with a display of miniature versions of a garden, a library, a playground, and an art space.
Ant Farm is meant to serve as a celebration of art, music, social interaction, sustainability, and landscape. While the inside of Museum Garage may be “just a garage,” this structure proves that imagination can turn even the mundane into something extraordinary.
Grunwaldzki Square Housing Complex – Wrocław, Poland
Poland was demolished by World War II, and Polish female architect Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak was one of the primary people responsible for rebuilding it. Her work included many schools and housing projects across all of Poland. Grunwaldzki Square housing complex in Wroclaw is just one stunning example of how she turned dust into dreamy architecture.
Grabowska-Hawrylak did more than just rebuild. She created striking, artistic structures in the wake of trauma and ruin. Her style often included ribbon-like facades and geometric windows, like the curvy balconies and windows on her famous Grunwaldzki Square highrise.
Library of Birmingham – Birmingham, England
Francine Houben and her firm Mecanoo Architecten designed the Library of Birmingham is so much more than just a library. The building itself is a gorgeous spectacle that has the additional purposes of providing shade to visitors and passers-by as well as serving as a garden terrace where people can enjoy the outdoors.
The Library of Birmingham was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize, a British award for excellence in architecture. While the library’s exterior is stunning, to say the least, its interior is nothing to scoff at either, with its curved walls lined with books upon books upon books.
The Broad – Los Angeles, California
The Broad, a contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles, was designed by Liz Diller, a woman who was named in Time’s 100 most influential people list in 2018. Diller is a co-founder of the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. In 2015, the Broad was completed, making it one of Diller’s most notorious works to date.
Nicknamed “the veil and the vault,” the Broad is a public space of art exhibition with storage for the lending library for its foundation. The building is enveloped by a porous “veil” that filters light inside in gorgeous ways.
A16 Motorway – Switzerland
Running through the Swiss Jura Mountains, the A16 Motorway, also known as the Transjurane provided a bit more than transportation. Architect Flora Ruchat-Roncati along with Renato Salvi, both of the university ETH Zurich masterfully designed the highway after winning a competition in 1988 to do just that.
Flora Ruchat-Roncati was ETH Zurich’s first female professor and chair of architecture. She became quite an influential figure in Swiss architecture. Her work led her to be known as the “poet of concrete” for her impactful and mystifying tunnels, bridges, and structures along the highway.
Hearst Castle – San Simeon, California
Julia Morgan’s first independent project was to design the bell tower on the Mills College campus in Oakland, which did not fall during San Francisco’s great earthquake in 1906. However, she is most known for another outstanding piece of architecture. Morgan was hired in 1919 to design what would become Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.
Her 28 years of work on the castle were inspired by her classical architectural training in Paris as well as her engineering background and history of work with reinforced concrete. Nearly every detail of the castle grounds was designed by Morgan herself.
Porsche Museum – Stuttgart, Germany
Austrian architect Elke Delugan Meissl is a co-founder of the architecture firm Delugan Meissl Associated Architects. She played a huge role in the futuristic and ultra-modern design of the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, which her firm was contracted to create.
Lots of thought into space and gravity went into designing the museum to mirror the qualities of Porche’s brand. Through the use of innovative technology combined with extraordinary creativity, an exhibition room expanding 160 meters was built inside of a structure that appears to be tilted on its side.
The Soft House – Hamburg, Germany
Famous for her architectural inclusion of solar cell technology, Sheila Kennedy is making waves in the world of spacial and environmentally-friendly structures. The Soft House in Hamburg, Germany is one fine example of her outstanding work. It was built in 2013 after winning the International Building Exhibition competition.
Kennedy is the sole founder of Boston architecture firm KVA Matx, the designer of the Soft House. Her work expands far beyond this, however. She is also the Professor of the Practice of Architecture at MIT, the first and only woman to have ever held that position.
Chandigarh – Punjab, India
British architect Jane Drew was the only woman on the development team for Chandigarh, an entire modern city she was hired to help build as the capital of the region of Punjab, India. Her previous projects in West Africa led the Indian Prime minister to request that she and her husband Maxwell Fry be part of the job in 1951.
She and Fry worked alongside the famous Swiss architect Le Corbusier to create a city out of nothing. The focus for Drew and her husband in building Chandigarh was on practical and affordable housing.
Football Stadium Arena – Borisov, Belarus
Špela Videčnik was a project leader in the design of the Football Stadium Arena in Borisov, Belarus with the architectural studio OFIS Architects, of which is is a co-founder. Construction of this masterpiece of architecture and design was completed in 2014.
The stunning facade of the stadium, made of steel and concrete, cleverly mimics the image of a soccer ball with its curves and alternating panels that provide a checkered look. Videčnik and her company were hired to design a football stadium “worthy of its fans,” and they certainly delivered.
GSW Headquarters – Berlin, Germany
GSW Headquarters building in Berlin is the private property of a real estate company designed by Louisa Hutton and her firm Sauerbruch Hutton, which she co-founded with Matthias Sauerbruch. The building was completed in 1999 and is a harmony between the old and the new, with 1950s-style architecture meets the technology of solar shutters and double-layer glass.
The GSW Headquarters has historical significance as well, in that it was the first skyscraper built after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The idea was to rehabilitate the space in the name of eco-friendliness and innovation in an urban environment.
Royal Danish Playhouse – Copenhagen, Denmark
Architectural firm Lundgaard & Tranberg designed the Royal Danish Playhouse in Copenhagen, Denmark. Lene Tranberg is the co-founder of the firm and was a key player in the creation of the magnificent structure. To date, the Royal Danish Playhouse is considered to be one of the most prominent Danish buildings of the new millennium.
The top story of the building’s facade is encased in glass and above it the scene tower, a copper cube. The playhouse sits on the straight, offering panoramic views of Copenhagen’s harbor. Almost half of the structure is projected over the water.
Serpentine Pavilion – London, England
The Serpentine Pavillion commission began in 2000, where every year, a new architect is chosen to design a structure there. In 2018, Mexican architect Frida Escobedo was chosen. To decorate this London courtyard, Escobedo created a structure with woven-looking tiles and a ceiling made of curved mirrors.
Escobedo was the youngest architect ever chosen to design the Serpentine Pavillion, and she did not disappoint. Her work encompassed a blend of Mexican and British styles that used light and the energy of the location, set directly on the Prime Meridian line, to accomplish a space of pause and excitement.
Yamanashi Museum of Fruit – Mount Fuji, Japan
Japanese architect Itsuko Hasegawa designed the stunning Yamanashi Museum of Fruit in Mount Fuji, Japan, finished in 1994, commissioned by the agricultural association. The structure consists of three buildings shaped like shells (“fruit seeds”).
The “seeds” are meant to both represent fruit as the wealth of the region and symbolize the more internal types of fruits: spiritual sensuality, lust, and intelligence. Built as a sort of greenhouse, the buildings let white light shine in to spark the fruits of creativity in all who visit. Each structure’s facade is made of transparent glass veined by steel.
São Paulo Museum of Art – São Paulo, Brazil
While Lina Bo Bardi has many brilliant structures, she is most recognized for the São Paulo Museum of Art. The museum was built upon concrete stilts in an effort to maintain views of the city from around the plaza. Her combination of modernist and brutalist style in the building’s design is part of what makes the museum a masterpiece.
The structure’s concrete pillars were purposefully painted bright red, the same as the principal color of the museum’s facade, to call attention to them, as they are as much a part of the design as the building itself.
Manetti Shrem Museum of Art – Davis, California
The New York architecture firm SO – IL won a competition in 2013 to design the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, California. Jing Liu, co-founder of architecture firm SO – IL with her husband, was integral in the creation of the museum, which has been the firm’s largest commission.
Liu was born in China, but after moving around a lot as a teenager, she ended up studying at Tulane University School of Architecture in 2004. From there, so moved to New York and began a noteworthy career. Aside from co-founding her firm, she also teaches architecture at Columbia University.
New Museum of Contemporary Art – New York, New York
Known for her modernist design techniques, Kazuyo Sejima prefers to work with metal, glass, and marble for shiny surfaces, resulting in a clean feel in her structures. The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, one of Sejima’s most famous buildings, also adds in elements of minimalism with its offset, stacked cubes.
Sejima’s goal is to impact the human experience and the way we think with her architecture. The New Museum of Contemporary Art was designed to be both slightly similar but still quite different from the surrounding buildings, perhaps to stimulate our cognitive world inside.
Citroën Showroom – Paris, France
One of the gifts of an architect is to transform what could be an ordinary space into a magical one. French architect Manuelle Gautrand did just that in her design of the Citroën showroom, located right on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Citroën is a French automobile manufacturer.
The Citroën showroom is the piece that earned Gautrand recognition across the globe, though her stunning work now expands far beyond. She’s taught and given seminars at universities all around Europe and the US, helping to shape a new generation of architects as prolific as she is.
Montevideo – Rotterdam, Netherlands
Standing at 43-stories tall, Montevideo is one of the tallest female-designed buildings on the planet. Francine Houben, architecture firm Mecanoo’s principal architect and co-founder, designed the Rotterdam skyscraper in the Netherlands. It is named after the capital city of Uruguay, Montevideo and contains apartment units plus office and retail space.
Houben’s work generally consists of a lot of libraries and other public or educational buildings, though being one of the tallest buildings in the world designed by a woman, Montevideo has received much more notoriety. The tower’s giant letter “M” at the top helps its total height reach 500 feet.
The Heydar Aliyev Centre – Baku, Azerbaijan
Zaha Hadid’s brilliant architectural design work deserves international recognition, starting with the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan. She finally won the Pritzker Prize, known as the Nobel Prize of architecture, in 2004, due to her groundbreaking talent and accomplishments. She was the first woman to receive this prize.
Sadly, the Iraqi-born British architect passed away suddenly in 2016, leaving behind a slew of projects already in the works, not to mention a huge legacy. Her amazing structures can be found all over the world, from Azerbaijan to England to Denmark to Ohio.
METI Handmade School – Rudrapur, Bangladesh
Given the global climate crisis, the world needs more architects like Anna Heringer, an international leader in the sustainable architecture movement. One of her most renowned projects, the METI Handmade School in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, utilized local materials as well as maintained other green design techniques, all the while considering the Bangladesh culture and gorgeous design aesthetic.
The METI Handmade School is a primary school built mostly of bamboo and mud with the utmost environmental efficiency and structural integrity in mind. The school was completed in 2005 and provides an inspiring space for children to engage in early studies.
The London Eye – London, England
A competition to design a landmark for the turn of the millennium led to Julia Barfield and her husband David Marks creating the now-infamous London Eye. They built it despite the fact that it didn’t win, and it was still completed in the year 2000. Today, it remains one of London’s most popular attractions.
Barfield is a co-founder with her husband of their firm Marks Barfield Architects, which they began in 1990. Their firm has won more than 60 awards. Barfield takes particular interest in geometry and associates it with the natural, efficient organization of nature.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial – Washington, D.C.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of Maya Lin’s many architectural projects and art installations, though it is perhaps her most notorious work. As might be clear through the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., Lin has become known for her minimalist designs that incorporate architecture into the natural landscape.
Lin was only 21 and a senior studying architecture at Yale when she designed a V-shaped black wall etched with the names of fallen Vietnam veterans for a funeral architecture seminar. When she entered it into a national design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, she won.
Lieb House – Barnegat Light, New Jersey
It’s a strange sight to see, the Lieb House, designed by Denise Scott Brown and her husband Robert Venturi just after she was added to his architecture firm as a partner. The house was completed in 1969, and up until recently was an extraordinary structure existing in an ordinary neighborhood in Barnegat Light, New Jersey.
The house’s strangeness largely comes from the giant number nine painted on the side and the geometric windows on a box-shaped house, including its flat roof. Lieb House was recently relocated to Long Island, or else it would have been torn down.
Atlantis Condominium – Miami, Florida
Atlantis Condominium may be a 20-story luxury condo building, a common occurrence in Miami, but this particular building has become a landmark and an icon after being used on the set and opening credits of Miami Vice. Its designer, architecture firm Arquitectonica, was co-founded by a female leader in the New Urbanism movement, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
Atlantis Condominium utilizes major concepts of New Urbanism, promoting walkable neighborhoods and environmentally-friendly practices in everyday life. Part of drawing people toward this type of environmentally-friendly behavior is by designing places like Atlantic Condominium, which are a pleasure to be a part of.
Supreme Court of Israel – Jerusalem, Israel
In 1986, Ada Karmi-Melamede and her brother Ram Karmi won a global competition to design Israel’s new Supreme Court, which was finished in 1992. Together, they designed a structure that combined both the traditions of Mediterranean architecture and classical, judicial style to create a now widely acclaimed structure.
Karmi-Melamede’s work extends beyond this one huge accomplishment as well. Her architecture firm has designed everything from educational buildings to industrial plants to private residences. She is well-versed in both urban design and smaller-scale projects and has taught at prestigious universities like Yale, Penn, and Columbia.
The Leonardo – Johannesburg, South Africa
The Leonardo, now the tallest building in Africa, was only recently completed in 2019. The architects in charge were from Co-Arc International Architects, whose director is Catharine Atkins. Atkins and another architect at the firm, Malika Walele, were the two leading women behind the project.
At 745 feet tall with 55 stories, the Leonardo towers over Johannesburg. It is home to apartments, shops, office spaces, and even hotel rooms. Aside from the two leading women, nine other women were on the Leonardo’s design team, which is pretty unprecedented in such a male-dominated field.
Lever House – New York, New York
Lever House’s design was a team effort between Skidmore, Owings and Merrill architects Natalie de Blois and Gordon Bunshaft. The building was completed in 1952 and remains one of the tallest women-designed buildings in the world. A pioneer in a male-dominated field, de Blois began her architecture career in 1944.
One of her most famous accomplishments she was not given credit for until 2014: she co-designed the Pepsi building, completed in 1960, again with Bunshaft. In fact, the sole credit was given to Bunshaft for most of their work together until recently.
Jess Lakritz 