Post Your Coins Featuring An Architect

This one sprang immediately to mind for me! It's a medal vs. a coin, but was struck by the US Mint as a commemorative piece as part of the 1980-84 American Arts Gold Medallions set.

I don't have immediate access to my set, so here's an image from Heritage Auctions.


(Image Credit: courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

Thanks for sharing Commems. FLW. There doesn't seem to be a silver, CuNi or copper piece featuring him...at least that I've found.

This is a silver 10 Euro from Finland featuring Eero Saarinen who happens to be my favorite modern architect. He designed the Gateway arch in St. Louis and the TVA terminal at JFK and many other mid century buildings. He sadly died before the arch was even finished.

The obverse features a silhouette of his famous tulip chair while the reverse features the gateway arch.

A very tricky topic! The fanous English architect Christopher Wren (who rebuilt St Paul's Cathedral and most London churches after the Great Fire of London) was depicted on the first modern £50 note, but I haven't got one (£50 was a lot of money to put aside in the 1980s),

This is stretching a point, but Winston Churchill was quite skilled at designing and building things in the grounds of his house at Chartwell in Kent. He built brick walls and a small cottage in the grounds where he did his painting.

This coin features Le Corbusier, a Swiss French architect most famous, in my opinion, for the Villa Savoye outside Paris. I got to visit the house during my study abroad in college which was exciting!



The obverse features the Swiss 5Fr and confederatio and helvetia while the reverse features Le Corbusier's Modular Man. The Modulor is an anthropometric scale of proportions devised by the Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier. It was developed as a visual bridge between two incompatible scales, the Imperial and the metric systems. It is based on the height of a man with his arm raised.

This coin features Antoni Gaudi, the architect of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. I, too, visited here during my studies in college, so this coin is special to me. The reverse has a portrait of Gaudi and an image of the Sagrada Familia.

Here's another from the modern US commemorative coin series...the 1992 White House Bicentennial Silver Dollar.

The coin's reverse includes a half-length portrait of James Hoban, the original architect of the White House. The Irish-born Hoban was also the architect behind the Old South Carolina State House in Charleston, South Carolina (1790) and the First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia (1795); Hoban also worked as a supervising architect on the US Capitol, as well as on many other projects, including Oak Hill, the home of James Monroe.

I like that white house dollar! You can see Europe likes commemorating their architects more than the US. Here's an Italian 10 Euro featuring Andrea Palladio, an Italian Renaissance master and his Villa Rotunda near Vicenza. I also got to see this house during my study abroad.