Googling Architecture
The Top three living architects, according to Google
1. Christopher Alexander
2. Frank O. Gehry
3. I.M.Pei
by Greg Bryant
Look around you, at the built world. It's the work of nameless economic forces, some named architectural movements, and a few named architects.
On the other hand, there's Google's Page Rank, a citation weighing of web page content. It doesn't reflect the built environment. It reflects the Internet. Google is the largest index of documents ever created, but it's also the newest.
You can see this by asking the question about living architects: who's the googliest of them all? The answer is architecture's primary philosopher, who is also anathema inside modern circles.
Google results like this probably reflect current mindshare, a common enough expression on the world wide web. Although not yet in the dictionary, it means a percentage of the Collective Conscience, of the Great Conversation. The Internet certainly reflects the structure of people's thinking in many ways. Well, the structure of those who write down what they think.
So in googling living architects, it seemed only fair to weigh the effect on thought as well as on the news. The three top ranked living architects were, in order, Frank O. Gehry, I.M. Pei and Christopher Alexander. But there are several movements that owe their existence to Alexander: the Patterns movement, in buildings and software design; the New Urbanism movement; the Design Methods movement -- to name just a few. Although Gehry and Pei have probably influenced the practice of architecture, they have certainly not influenced the philosophy of architecture significantly. Since the Google index measures writing, and not buildings, Alexander could be considered the winner, as most influential living architect.
But I'm simply putting their names in alphabetical order. The reader can judge what it all means. And what the "google citation sweepstakes" and the consequent "advocacy through googling" means. It was recently announced that Linux beat Microsoft in google page ranking, and yet Microsoft is far better known to the majority of computer users. Similarly, modernism is better known to the masses than is Alexander's organic approach to making things for people. This could be interpreted very pessimistically: that socially positive and sensitive movements are destined primarily for active discussion among a minority.
Or, it could be that google ranking indicates the vanguard of influence. Google itself has a score of 17,500,000.
Here's the current google ranking of architects, living and dead, and some movements, from all times:
Thomas Jefferson: 933,000
Michelangelo Buonarroti: 599,000
Frank Lloyd Wright: 246,000
William Morris: 149,000
Andrea Palladio: 110,000
Le Corbusier: 87,100
Modern architecture: 81,700
Hundertwasser: 67,200
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: 55,400
Buckminster Fuller: 49,200
New Urbanism: 35,700
Alvar Aalto: 28,400
Frank Gehry: 28,100
25,100
Christopher Wren: 24,500
Vitruvius: 24,200
Oscar Niemeyer: 23,900
Gustave Eiffel: 21,800
Walter Gropius: 19,900
Louis Sullivan: 19,800
17,900
I. M. Pei: 17,400
Richard Meier: 17,100
Filippo Brunelleschi: 14,800
Otto Wagner: 12,600
Peter Eisenman: 9,350
Louis I. Kahn: 8,010
Antonio Gaudi: 9,290
Robert Venturi: 8,040
Inigo Jones: 7,900
Carlo Scarpa: 7,060
Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini: 6,890
Philip Johnson: 5,710
Richard Neutra: 5,380
Andres Duany: 4,770
Richard Rogers: 4,500
Hector Guimard: 4,470
Pier Luigi Nervi: 4,390
Moshe Safdie: 3,570
Pierre Koenig: 2,770
Bernard Maybeck: 2,500
Pietro Belluschi: 1,900
Postmodern architecture: 1,790
Sim van der Ryn: 1,530
Lawrence Halprin: 1,480
Serge Chermayeff: 837
January 14, 2003