Absenting Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson was perhaps the most famous and influential American architect of the 20th century. The Pritzker Prize winner (1979) was a pioneer in American modernism and later laid the intellectual and architectural groundwork for the post-modern and deconstructivist styles of the 1970s and 1980s. His thick, black round-framed glasses and high profile as a practicing architect, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and public intellectual brought him to the fore of American design thinking, a place he occupied well into his advanced age. His masterpieces include the Glass House in New Canaan, CT, (1949) which is a near perfect expression of the modern desire to bring the outside in; the Seagram Building in New York, while working in the office of Mies Van der Rohe; the massive, glassed façade of the PPG Palace in Pittsburgh, PA,; the postmodern AT&T Building (1984) in New York; and one of the original megachurches, the Crystal Cathedral (1980) in Orange County, CA.

As culture critic for the Washington Post, Phillip Kennicott regularly laments the lack of interesting contemporary architecture in the nation's capital. His job got a little more difficult upon discovering Richard North's home, a mid-century-modern gem by renowned architect Marcel Breuer. "It's one of those houses that gets rediscovered every five or ten years," Kennicott says. "Given Dr. North's low-key but faithful way of living in the space, perhaps that's for the best."

Philip Nobel is the author of Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero (Metropolitan, 2005). He regularly writes architectural criticism for The New York Times and Vogue and has appeared as a commentator on CBS and MSNBC.

Alastair Philip Wiper I am an English photographer and writer based in Copenhagen and working worldwide. From the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, to giant shipyards in South Korea and radio observatories in Peru I work with the weird and wonderful subjects of industry, science, architecture, and the things that go on behind the scenes. The things that human beings create and build amaze me, and I take an anthropological approach to the subjects of my photography, seeking out the unintentional beauty in the infrastructure. For the last eight years I have been the house photographer for designer and artist Henrik Vibskov, travelling, building and photographing a lot of strange things. I am represented by Sumo. Selections from my archives are represented by VIEW Pictures and the Science Photo Library. I am supported by Wonderful Machine.