ARCHITECTURE

Richard Rogers

Architect, 65

What he’s done: The London-based Rogers’ international reputation was launched in 1977, as the co-designer with Italy’s Renzo Piano of Paris’ Pompidou Center. A decade later, he became known as Modernism’s great defender during a nasty battle with Prince Charles over the fate of British architecture. In the meantime, he has become one of the world’s most inventive, high-profile proponents of a high-tech architecture that continues to revere the machine as the tool of liberation.

Outlook for ‘99: Rogers was hired to design England’s $1billion-plus Millennium Dome in 1996, a project already as controversial as any in Rogers’ career. The Greenwich dome--intended to be temporary--has been attacked in the British press as a massive waste of money. Whatever its fate, it will be the world’s largest continual membrane structure, a giant tent-like dome more than 1,000 feet in diameter, supported by slender exterior columns and cables. Like Paxton’s Crystal Palace more than a century ago, the dome will house a fair marketing Britain’s accomplishments as the century closes. It is to be opened at a ceremony attended by Queen Elizabeth II on Dec. 31.

Norman Foster

Architect, 63

What he’s done: The elder statesman of “high-tech architecture,� Foster has a faith in technology’s ability to inspire a new, machine-driven architecture that remains unshaken. He is best known for the 1984 Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank

headquarters building, made out of huge tubular steel trusses with service components that could be plugged into its towering structural frame. He has since designed a series of massive civic-scaled projects, including England’s Stansted airport; the new Hong Kong airport; and the delicate Mediatheque building in Ni^mes, France.

Outlook for ‘99: Foster’s current design for a renovated Reichstag is the centerpiece of a massive rebuilding program German officials hope will reconstitute Berlin as one of Europe’s great cultural centers. The design caps the Reichstag with a low, translucent glass-and-steel cupola that will hover like a beacon above the parliamentary building’s stone facades, flooding it with light--an apt symbol for the birth of a new Germany.

Morphosis

Architectural firm, 25

What they’ve done: Once considered the rising star of L.A.’s budding architectural scene, Morphosis, headed by Thom Mayne, made its reputation with a handful of elaborate houses marked by fragmented forms and muscular structures. But since its heyday in the ‘80s, the firm has evolved from a maker of radically expressionistic architecture to a more organic, stealthy aesthetic.

Outlook for ‘99: Morphosis will complete two large-scale public buildings: the Diamond Ranch High School campus in the hills overlooking Pomona, and a more compressed, urban campus in Long Beach. Diamond Ranch will surprise those familiar with Morphosis’ more machine-like work. Its metal and concrete forms evoke overlapping plates that fold into the rolling landscape. By contrast, the Long Beach International Elementary School has an oasis-like feel, a perimeter building on an urban lot with a tough inner courtyard that steps up to a rooftop playground.

Daniel Libeskind

Architect, 52

What he’s done: A Polish-born American who seems to relish his reputation as provocateur, Libeskind enjoys rising fame that’s earned him commissionssuch as the design for the expansion of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Britain’s Imperial War Museum in Manchester and a Jewish museum in San Francisco.

Outlook for ‘99: Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, a controversial work that is a commentary on the Jewish culture that once thrived in that city and was destroyed by the Nazis, was supposed to be completed in late 1998, but its opening was delayed until sometime this year.