Alejandro Aravena works inside paradoxes, seeing space and flexibility in public housing, clarity in economic scarcity, and the keys to rebuilding in the causes of natural disasters. He

TED Fellow Brandon Clifford mines knowledge from the past to design new futures.

Christian Benimana wants to build a network of architects who can help Africa's booming cities flourish in sustainable, equitable ways -- balancing growth with values that are uniquely African. From Nigeria to Burkina Faso and beyond, he shares examples of architecture bringing communities together. A pan-African movement of architects, designer...

Doris Kim Sung is a biology student turned architect interested in thermo-bimetals, smart materials that respond dynamically to temperature change.

Being a designer of breathtaking and sometimes confounding buildings seems almost a footnote to the amazing life of architect Daniel Libeskind.

If architect and writer John Cary has his way, women will never need to stand in pointlessly long bathroom lines again. Lines like these are representative of a more serious issue, Cary says: the lack of diversity in design that leads to thoughtless, compassionless spaces. Design has a unique ability to dignify and make people feel valued, respe...

Ellen Dunham-Jones takes an unblinking look at our underperforming suburbs -- and proposes plans for making them livable and sustainable.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has contributed pioneering work to our understanding of happiness, creativity, human fulfillment and the notion of "flow" -- a state of heightened focus and immersion in activities such as art, play and work.

Xavier De Kestelier is an architect and technologist with a passion for human space exploration.

Bjarke Ingels believes that architecture is the art and science of making sure our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.

From the micro scale to the building scale, Neri Oxman imagines and creates structures and objects that are inspired, informed and engineered by, for and with nature.

Rahul Mehrotra is an architect working in India who focuses on institutional buildings and conservation of historic places. He is also a professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

Most people look at cardboard tubes and see something fit for the recycling bin. But architect Shigeru Ban turns them into beautiful buildings.

An architect and urban designer, Alison Killing uses journalism, filmmaking and exhibitions to help people better understand the built environment.

A living legend, Frank Gehry has forged his own language of architecture, creating astonishing buildings all over the world, such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, and Manhattan's new IAC building.

An architect by training, John Cary has devoted his career to expanding the practice of design for the public good.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson As an architect, Michael Hansmeyer asks, "What is the origin of the forms we design?" And he asks: "What kind of forms would we design if we had no bias, if we had no preconception? What kind of forms would we design if we could free ourselves from our education?" "How," he says, "Would we go about creating...

Kotchakorn Voraakhom is a landscape architect who works on building green public space that tackle climate change.

With Architizer, an online hub for architecture, Marc Kushner is breaking architecture out of its insular echo chamber and reconnecting the public with buildings.

Grace H. Kim is an internationally recognized expert in cohousing -- the art and craft of creating communities.

Ronald Rael draws, builds, writes, 3D-prints and teaches about architecture as a cultural endeavor deeply influenced by a unique upbringing in a desolate alpine valley in southern Colorado.

With an eye for nature’s forms and lessons learned from its materials, Jeanne Gang creates iconic environments that stand in curvy relief to blocky urban cityscapes.

Débora Mesa Molina ​makes space for experimentation in a highly regulated profession.

Elon Musk is the CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and the CEO/CTO of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX).

Soft cars, jet packs and houses made of meat are all in a day's work for urban designer, architect and TED Fellow Mitchell Joachim.

Michael Hansmeyer is an architect and programmer who explores the use of algorithms and computation to generate architectural form.

On September 21, gunmen attacked a shopping mall in Nairobi, killing at least 67 people, with many others still missing. We are extraordinarily saddened to hear that among the victims of this violence were TEDxKraków speaker Ross Langdon and his partner Elif Yavuz. Ross, an architect by trade, gave a beautiful talk at TEDxKraków 2012 abou...

Food is a shared necessity -- but also a shared way of thinking, argues Carolyn Steel. Looking at food networks offers an unusual and illuminating way to explore how cities evolved.

Anna Heringer’s sustainable designs lend breathtaking forms to easily-available local materials while developing the skills and consciousness of their builders.

Founder of the influential studio Morphosis, and co-founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne marries conceptual ideas with form, challenging the way we perceive structure, building and the environment.