THE 20(TH) CENTURY FORM GIVERS

With modern architecture beginning to mature, its founders are still alive and busier than ever before. The cast:

P: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT. 87, silver-maned, native-born genius of U.S. architecture, whose pioneering prairie houses and office buildings created a new concept of "organic" architecture, cleaned away the gingerbread, demolished the concept of a building as a box with holes punched in it, and so brought free-flowing space into contemporary architecture.

P: LE CORBUSIER (real name: Charles Edouard Jean-neret), 68, famed for his open-floor plan, cubes on stilts, and slogan, "a house is a machine for living." Only 20th century master who does not live and work in the U.S., "Corbu" was chief inspirer of Manhattan's glass-slab United Nations headquarters, is currently at work on a new capital for India's Punjab (TIME, June 8, 1953).

P: WALTER ADOLF GROPIUS, 73, founder and director (1919-28) of Germany's famed Bauhaus School (later chairman of Harvard's department of architecture), whose artists, architects and designers pioneered in finding beauty through the honest use of the machine.

P: LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE, 70, German-born, craft-trained Chicago architect, today the leading influence on younger architects, who praise his purist brick, glass and steel buildings.

P: MARCEL BREUER, 54, Hungarian-born, Gropius-trained, famed for his 1920s tubular-steel furniture, currently designing buildings on four U.S. campuses and new Paris UNESCO headquarters (TIME, June 25).

P: RICHARD NEUTRA, 64, Vienna-born, since the 19205 famed for his modern West Coast houses (TIME Cover, Aug. 15, 1949).

In addition to the masters, there is in the U.S. a whole cast of modern architects whose contribution has been significant. Among them:

P: WALLACE KIRKMAN HARRISON, 60, who designed (with the late Raymond Hood) Manhattan's Rockefeller Center in the 1930s, including its majestic RCA Building, headed the team of architects who drew plans for the U.N. Secretariat Building (TIME Cover, Sept. 22, 1952).

P: GORDON BUNSHAFT,47. M.I.T.-groomed for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who has brought Mies van der Rohe's style to the marketplace with Manhattan's Lever House and the Manufacturers Trust Co., Fifth Avenue branch.

P: PHILIP C. JOHNSON, 49, witty, opinionated tastemaker (longtime director of the architecture department of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art), famed for his New Canaan, Conn, glass house (once described by Frank Lloyd Wright as "a monkey cage for a monkey").

P: MINORU YAMASAKI, 43, Seattle-born, best known for his prize-winning new St. Louis Airport (TIME, April 16).

P: I. M. PEI, 39, Canton-born, M.I.T.-and Harvard-trained chief architect for Real-Estate Promoter William Zeckendorf, designer of Denver's Mile-High Center and Formosa's Tunghai University.

P: PAUL RUDOLPH, 37, fast-rising, Harvard-trained comer whose reputation is based on his self-styled "structural-exhibitionist" Florida houses.

P: BUCKMINSTER FULLER, 60, more geologician than architect, whose skin-and-space Geodesic domes are now standard shelter for the U.S. Marine Corps, have been flown in for use along the arctic DEW radar stations.

P: EDUARDO CATALANO, 38, Argentine-born whose double-curve roof on his house in Raleigh, N.C. has attracted such attention that he has now posted a sign: "Visitors Will Be Prosecuted."

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