Frank Owen Gehry, CC (born Frank Owen Goldberg; February 28, 1929) is a Canadian American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.

His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. His works are cited as being among the most important works of contemporary architecture in the 2010 World Architecture Survey, which led Vanity Fair to label him as "the most important architect of our age".

Gehry's best-known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles; Experience Music Project in Seattle; Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; the Vitra Design Museum and MARTa Museum in Germany; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Cinémathèque française in Paris; and 8 Spruce Street in New York City. But it was his private residence in Santa Monica, California, which jump-started his career, lifting it from the status of "paper architecture" – a phenomenon that many famous architects have experienced in their formative decades through experimentation almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in later years. Gehry is also the designer of the future Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial.

Paul Goldberger (born December 4, 1950 in Passaic, New Jersey) is the Architecture Critic for The New Yorker, where since 1997 he has written the magazine's celebrated "Sky Line" column. He also holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in New York City. He was formerly Dean of the Parsons School of Design, a division of The New School.

Goldberger, the son of Morris Goldberger and Edna Kronman, grew up in distinctly low-rise Nutley, New Jersey, where he graduated from Nutley High School. He subsequently attended and graduated from Yale University.

He began his career at The New York Times, where in 1984 his architecture criticism was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, the highest award in journalism.

He is the author of several books, most recently Why Architecture Matters, published in 2009 by Yale University Press;Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture, a collection of his architecture essays published in 2009 by Monacelli Press, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, published in 2010 by Taschen. In 2008 Monacelli published Beyond the Dunes: A Portrait of the Hamptons, which he produced in association with the photographer Jake Rajs. Paul Goldberger’s chronicle of the process of rebuilding Ground Zero, entitled UP FROM ZERO: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York, which was published by Random House in the fall of 2004, and brought out in a new, updated paperback edition in 2005, was named one of The New York Times Notable Books for 2004. Paul Goldberger has also written The City Observed: New York, The Skyscraper, On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Post-Modern Age, Above New York, and The World Trade Center Remembered.

Thomas Pritzker (born 1951) is a member of the wealthy Pritzker family. He is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Pritzker Organization (TPO), which manages the various Pritzker family business assets, and the Executive Chairman of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Besides his business interests, he is the chairman of the board of the Art Institute of Chicago and organized the Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium.

Greg Lynn (born 1964 in North Olmsted, OH) is owner of the Greg Lynn FORM office, an o. Univ. Professor of architecture at University of Applied Arts Vienna, a studio professor at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, and the Davenport Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. He was the winner of the Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2010 Lynn was named a Fellow by United States Artists.

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O. Disney, he was co-founder of Walt Disney Productions, which later became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation is now known as The Walt Disney Company and had an annual revenue of approximately US$36 billion in the 2010 financial year.

Disney is particularly noted as a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, for whom Disney himself provided the original voice. During his lifetime he received four honorary Academy Awards and won 22 Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Disney also won seven Emmy Awards and gave his name to the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the U.S., as well as the international resorts Tokyo Disney Resort, Disneyland Paris, and Hong Kong Disneyland.