You cannot have a starchitecture map without Frank Gehry. When the Stata opened in 2004, replacing M.I.T.'s legendary Building 20, the Boston Globe's Robert Campbell declared it "a work of architecture that embodies serious thinking about how people live and work, and at the same time shouts the joy of invention."

The center on Harvard's campus represents the only North American project French-Swiss giant Le Corbusier designed that actually got built. Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the building. When it opened in 1963, a critic said Le Corbusier "violently asserts the independence of his building from its grid of surrounding streets and architecture." We're down the street from it; we agree.

Here's what the firm of architect Robert A.M. Stern has to say about the 32-story luxury condo that the Yale architecture dean had a hand in designing: "The Clarendon is clad in the traditional Boston palette of red brick and limestone, but expressed in a way that relates to its modern neighbors with two-story recessed masses that modulate the scale of the whole."

Italian Renzo Piano designed the expanded bits of the Gardner, which opened in 2012. As Matthew Reed Baker noted of the Piano wing in Boston Magazine upon its opening: "It doesn’t try to wow you, and that’s a good thing. After all, it’s not meant to upstage its older sister." (Piano also played a major role in designing the expanded Fogg museum at Harvard.)

Marked for demolition at one point, along with the rest of the old Combat Zone, a years-long preservation push saved one of the few extant Hub examples of the work of 19th-century giant Henry Hobson Richardson. (Another biggie: Trinity Church.) Believe it or not, the 66-foot building, now luxury apartments, was considered an example of that newfangled skyscraper trend when it opened in the 1880s.

Henry Cobb of I.M. Pei's firm, now Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, designed what became (and remains) the tallest building in New England when it was finished in 1976. Its exterior includes 10,344 reflective-glass panes, making it a kind of modernist exclamation point on Boston's pivot out of the bad, old '70s into the slightly better '80s.

Yup, the State House in Beacon Hill was designed by a starchitect—by the first starchitect perhaps. Charles Bulfinch was at least the first person born in the U.S. to practice architecture as a profession. After graduating Harvard, he spent a chunk of the 1780s touring Europe, falling under the thrall of neoclassicism.

Postmodernist giant Philip Johnson faced two requests in designing the Copley Square addition in the early 1970s, according to the Boston Public Library: observe the existing roof line of the McKim Building, and use material (Milford granite) that would harmonize with the exterior of the existing Central Library building. He did.

This was designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, he of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and finished in 1955. He apparently designed it in tandem with the M.I.T. Chapel, and it's meant as a prime example of thin-shelled structures.