Creative Occupations Trivia Quiz

Answer: Architect

Zaha Hadid was born in Iraq, moving to London in 1972 to study at the long established Architectural Association School of Architecture. She developed her own style of architecture and was dubbed 'The Queen of Curves' by one national British newspaper.

Among her designs are the Aquatic Centre built for the 2012 London Olympics, the MAXXI museum in Rome and the Galaxy SOHO complex in Beijing. Hadid died in 2016 but the architectural firm she established is still in business eight years later.

Answer: Architect

Another modern architect, Oscar Niemeyer was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and died there at the age of one hundred and four in 2012. Niemeyer is famous for his designs of the buildings in Brasilia, the new Brazilian capital city built in the 1960s to be a more central location for the country. The layout was planned by Lúcio Costa.

Other famous buildings designed by Niemeyer are the Copan Building in Sao Paolo, Israel's University of Haifa and Spain's Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre. He is known for using white in his designs which often feature curves.

Answer: Architect

Norman Foster is an English born architect who became a peer in 1999, giving him the official title of Baron Foster of Thames Bank. He won a scholarship which enabled him to study at the Yale School of Architecture where he received his master's degree and met fellow architect Richard Rogers.

Foster established his own company, initially called Foster Associates, in 1967, renaming it Foster + Partners in 1999. The company has expanded into several other countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Australia (Sydney) and the USA, in New York City. Among the company's best known designs are the Gherkin, in London (officially 30 St Mary Axe), the Millau Viaduct in France and the reconstruction of Berlin's Reichstag building.

Answer: Architect

Born in Argentina, César Pelli moved to the USA to attend the University of Illinois School of Architecture and spent the rest of his life in the country - he became a naturalised citizen in 1964. Pelli was particularly known for his designs of skyscrapers and for his innovative use of different materials.

The Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia are probably his best known design, but he is also the architect behind the Wells Fargo Center in Minneapolis and the Sevilla Tower in Spain - the latter building was originally named the Pelli Tower. Pelli died at the age of ninety-two in 2019.

Answer: Artist

José Victoriano González-Pérez was born in Spain but produced most of his work while living in Paris and using the name Juan Gris. He began his artistic career as a cartoonist, before turning full time to painting, mostly in his own version of the cubist style. Gris moved in the same circles as Matisse and Braque and one of his paintings, created in 1912, is 'A Portrait of Picasso'.

Among his other works are 'Still Life with Checked Tablecloth', owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and 'Maisons à Paris', also displayed in New York at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Gris died relatively young, aged forty, from kidney failure in 1927.

Answer: Artist

Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 and was something of a drifter in his younger days, spending time in London, Berlin and Paris while trying to find something to hold his interest. Art became the route he took, beginning in his late twenties. He is known for his bleak, distorted and surrealistic depictions of the human figure.

Among his most famous works are 'Crucifixion', an early work from 1933 and 'Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X', a distorted version of the earlier work of art and part of a series created in the 1950s. The latter painting is often referred to as the 'screaming Pope', due to the expression on the figure's face.

Answer: Artist

Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan was born in the Netherlands, changing his name to that by which he is now known in the 1900s. He was one of the founders of the De Stijl movement, which aimed to reduce art to the minimalist values of colour and style. Paintings in this form use primary colours in blocks and with straight lines. Mondrian's paintings in the style include 'Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow', from 1930.

Although Mondrian is mostly remembered for his later style, he has many other works to his name including paintings of windmills and portraits. Mondrian lived and worked in Paris on two separate occasions before the threat of the Second World War took him to New York where he died in 1944.

Answer: Artist

Born in what is now Latvia in 1903, Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz arrived in the USA as a child to join his father and older brothers in 1913. His father's early death left the family close to destitution.

Rothko's artistic career began in 1923, when he was inspired to study the subject by seeing a group of art students at work. He enrolled at Parsons School of Design in New York where he came into contact with other budding artists of the era. Paul Klee was one of his early influences and can be seen in many of Rothko's paintings, which often feature blocks of colour divided by horizontal lines. These have been called 'Colour field' paintings and represent the middle period of his work. He is also known for his abstract works and surrealism. Rothko died in 1970.

Answer: Author

Bach was born in Illinois and began writing in the 1960s, starting with a biographical book about his aviation career, published in 1963. Major success came with 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull', which become a best seller in the 1970s. The story about a gull who refused to conform caught the spirit of the times with its themes of self-realisation.

Although this novella is likely to be the first one that comes to mind, it is far from Bach's only work. Among his other publications are 'Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah' (1977) and 'The Ferret Chronicles', a collection of short novels published between 2002 and 2008.

Answer: Author

Although he was born in Northern Rhodesia, now known as Zambia, Wilbur Smith is primarily associated with South Africa. He published his first novel in 1964. Called 'When the Lion Feeds', he used his own family's experiences to create a family named the Courtneys. Smith was eventually to write 24 books about them, covering the generations from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

Smith also wrote a series based in Ancient Egypt and another dynastic series on a family named Ballantyne. Several of his novels have been filmed for the big screen and television. The author died in 2021.

Answer: Author

A prolific author of crime fiction, Ann Cleeves was born in 1954 and raised in Devon. Her name has become well known as several of her novels have been adapted for the television screen. The novels often focus on a particular police detective and the crimes they set out to solve. The two most famous are Vera Stanhope, who solves her crimes in Northumberland, in England's north east, and Jimmy Perez, based on the Scottish Shetland Islands. Another of her detectives is Inspector Vann, who works in Devon.

Other series feature George Palmer-Jones and Inspector Ramsay, and Ann also has some stand alone novels and numerous short stories to her credit. Her work has been recognised by several awards and honorary degrees from both Sunderland University and Newcastle University and an OBE.

Answer: Author

Born in Algeria at a time when it was a French territory, Camus never knew his father who was killed in action during the First World War. His family was poor, but one of Camus's teachers recognised his abilities and encouraged him, with the result that Camus gained a scholarship to continue his studies. He eventually graduated from the University of Algeria.

Camus was living in Paris when World War II broke out and was active in the resistance movement. He wrote in French, with his most famous works including ' L'Étranger ' (published in English as 'The Stranger' and 'The Outsider') and 'The Plague', published in 1947. Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, with his acceptance speech recognising the importance of his former teacher in his success. He was killed in a car accident in 1960.