The artists we've chosen to highlight in this story often worked on buildings and landscapes already destined to be important. But when they deployed their creative talents—in the areas of architectural tile, stained glass, mural design, ironwork, and architectural concrete—they gave each place a distinctive texture that made it truly unforgettable. Below, we celebrate the continued influence of their work on the built world that surrounds us.

When Stratton asked Caulkins to start an art pottery company with her in 1903, his answer was a resounding yes. Propelled by his business background and her artistic and managerial talents, Pewabic prospered. “The whole time Mary is doing this, the world is changing drastically,” says Annie Dennis, Pewabic’s education director and archivist. “Pewabic is part of the growing Arts and Crafts movement, and Detroit is one of the first cities in the U.S. to start an Arts and Crafts society.”

Stratton began designing architectural tiles and developing different kinds of glazes, including iridescent ones that drew upon traditional Middle Eastern ceramics. In 1907, the company moved into a Tudor Revival building designed by the firm of architect William Buck Stratton, whom she eventually married.

Horace Caulkins died in 1923, but Mary Chase Perry Stratton continued running the business until her death in 1961. Pewabic has operated as a nonprofit for the past 40-plus years, still making coveted architectural tiles and vessels using many of the techniques developed by Stratton and her colleagues. “She was always experimenting and exploring,” Dennis says. “She always had this hunger for knowledge within the arts and a passion for sharing it.” —Meghan Drueding

“[Opalescent glass] is colorful and chunky and looks like the candies in your grandmother’s candy dish,” says Krystyn Hastings-Silver, associate director of Lyndhurst, a National Trust Historic Site in Tarrytown, New York, that houses three windows believed by some to have been designed by La Farge. “And who does Tiffany learn that from? La Farge.”

La Farge had invited the younger Tiffany to see the process at his studio in the 1870s. In the following decades, both artists became involved in a bitter war of words and patent disputes, while competing for valuable commissions. La Farge’s stained-glass windows eventually appeared in noted buildings, including the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, and London’s Southwark Cathedral, but it was the shrewder Tiffany whose name is far better remembered. —Joe Sugarman

Howe was born in 1915 on a South Dakota reservation and studied painting at the Santa Fe Indian School before returning home. His early work depicted realistic tribal scenes—ceremonies, dances, and customs—such as those captured in 10 murals he painted in the Mobridge, South Dakota, city auditorium as part of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. Another WPA project had him painting the dome inside the Carnegie Library, now the Carnegie Resource Center, in Mitchell, South Dakota. That mural, Sun and Rain Clouds Over Hills, depicted bolts of lightning and mythical thunderbirds, which were thought to bring rain to the sun-scorched Great Plains. Howe would also design murals for the Mitchell Corn Palace, a community building and tourist attraction whose facade is decorated seasonally with different varieties of corn, grain, and grasses.

By the late 1950s, Howe was developing a signature abstract style, using vibrant colors to depict Native themes. Before his death in 1983, he won numerous art competitions and displayed works in more than 50 solo shows. A 2022 retrospective, Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe, spurred The New Yorker to label him an “American master.” The exhibition’s national tour ends in September 2023 at the South Dakota Art Museum. —Joe Sugarman

Other standout settings among her roughly 100 commissions include Temple Emanu-El and St. Bartholomew’s Church, both in New York, and the Great Hall of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. “She was part of this movement at the time, this idea of [using] architectural decoration [to make] public spaces beautiful,” says Skolnik, an art and architectural historian and a board member of the nonprofit International Hildreth Meière Association (IHMA), founded in 2004.

Meière developed close relationships with the craftspeople who executed her designs, incorporating the tips she picked up from them into her blend of classical training and artistic instincts. “She was very precise about color,” says her great-granddaughter, Anna Kupik. “She didn’t settle. She was very observant of how the light would reflect in the spaces.” Kupik; her mother, Hildreth Meière Dunn; and her grandmother, Meière’s daughter Louise Meière Dunn, are all board members of the IHMA. The organization promotes Meière’s legacy and helps to preserve her murals. Despite the protected status of many of the buildings she worked on, some pieces, such as her painted canvas panels at the currently endangered St. Michael’s Monastery Church in Union City, New Jersey, remain vulnerable. —Meghan Drueding

Simmons’ legacy has endured well beyond his death in 2009; architect David Adjaye was influenced by the blacksmith’s work when he designed the exterior skin of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, says Rossie Colter of the nonprofit Philip Simmons Foundation. The foundation was established to develop the Philip Simmons Garden, and it also opened his Charleston home and workshop—which once appeared on the National Trust’s list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places—as a museum in 2010.

Charlestonians remember Simmons as a soft-spoken, creative, and spiritual man, fiercely dedicated to his craft. In the 1970s, he was asked to create a design for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. After weeks of false starts, it was on the plane ride to the festival that he, according to Colter, “took out his sketch pad and pen” and developed the idea for the Star and Fish Gate, which is now owned by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and remains one of the blacksmith’s most lauded pieces.

“When he went to Washington, then everybody in Charleston realized he was something special,” says Colter. “He was not the village blacksmith anymore.” —Kayla Stewart

John Joseph Earley, 1881-1945

John Joseph Earley turned ordinary concrete into an art form. The son of a stonecutter who inherited his father’s business at 25, Earley developed a technique called “architectural” or “mosaic” concrete—a method of combining and exposing the small stones and other materials (known as “aggregate”) that, when mixed with cement and water, form concrete. Unless manipulated, concrete is typically gray and smooth, but Earley added texture and hue by scraping away the fine top layer to reveal colorful pebbles beneath. He used tiny pieces of ceramics, marble, glass, and stones to “paint” pictures or create intricate patterns.

Earley was born in New York but moved to Washington, D.C., as a young boy and would eventually leave a permanent mark on the city’s public spaces, bridges, and churches.

His first major commission remains his most visible. In 1915, the federal government hired him and his talented crew at Earley Studio to fashion the walls, stairs, sidewalks, obelisks, balustrades, and a 13-basin cascading fountain for the planned 12-acre Meridian Hill Park in the city’s Columbia Heights neighborhood. Due to budget constraints, the project wasn’t finished until 1936, but the results were spectacular. “The park is, perhaps, the most ambitious and successful example of Neoclassical park design in the United States,” reads the nomination form for its 1994 National Historic Landmark listing.