Although the Rogue's Gallery is for living architects, I'd like to make an exception. If there's a single architect on this list with a claim to true immortality, it's Craig Ellwood.

Credentials:

Craig Ellwood is best known for his elegant, modernist LA houses. Ellwood started his career in the post-war housing boom and immediately met the Eameses and mastermind John Entenza. Ellwood designed three of the Case Study houses: numbers 16, 17 and 18. Number 16 is particularly nice.

Something about Ellwood caught on, stood out, pulled clear of a pack of others like Koenig and Ain and Soriano, and his reputation shot through the roof. Through the 1950's he captained a busy practice and scored a fabulous number of published projects, many in Entenza's magazine. A media darling, he was. Score. Score.

Maybe it was his innovative use of steel framing in houses. He was the man of steel. Maybe it was the sexy locations - Bel Air, Beverly Hills, the Malibu beach, Santa Monica, Pasadena. Maybe it was his red Ferrari, the VROOM license plate, his string of wives, like a photogenic hip architect from central casting. "Get me a dynamic restless architect type."

Possibly it was the work, a clean, cool, Californian version of Mies, a series of steel and black glass boxes, with bravely exposed trusses and floor-to-ceiling windows and a sense of spatial liberation that might have leaked over from the architect's personality. In 1968 Ellwood nailed down his modernist credentials with a project in Palm Springs, the Max Palevsky house, joining the sunburned ranks of Lautner and Frey. Score.

Then he tackled his acknowledged masterwork. It's the Art Center College of Design, a huge building sited in hilly territory overlooking the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, an unforgettable steel-and-glass boxy land-bridge that straddles a deep ravine. As a work that transcends its site, in fact that turns the difficulties of its site to advantage, it's brilliant. Less charitable people have noticed a strange resemblance between the Art Center College and Mies van der Rohe's IIT main building, as well as a strange resemblance, now that you mention it, between Ellwood's Rosen House with Mies' Farnsworth House. Not so strange when you consider that 1) this kind of modernism is a set of reductive equations that might well arrive at the same answer, and 2) Ellwood and Mies shared James Tyler on their design staff.

Around 1980, Ellwood quit the profession, moved to Tuscany, and spent the rest of his life painting. He died in 1992.

Crimes:

There's just one crime.

There was no Craig Ellwood.

Craig Ellwood was a fiction. The more you look for him, the more this important reputation begins to weirdly levitate above anyone's identity.

The guy in the photographs was named Jonnie Burke. According to the Neil Jackson biography, after WWII Jonnie Burke found himself as a young man in the middle of this lucrative housing boom. Sensibly, he co-founded a construction business with his brother Cleve and two USAF buddies called the Marzicola brothers. One of the Marzicolas had a contractor's license.

They named the business Craig Ellwood. It sounded 'swanky'. They named it after a liquor store on Beverly Boulevard. And because Jonnie was the less-skilled, less-busy guy who tended to hang around the office, he was always next to the phone, so….

People started calling for "Craig Ellwood". Jonnie Burke pretended to be "Craig Ellwood" on the phone although he couldn't draw and was a long way from being an architect. It must have been hard to stop pretending. It must have been embarrassing, this snowballing reputation based on his staffers' work. Or maybe not. I don't know. Somehow Jonnie Burke rode his snowball for three decades, roaring through in his red Ferrari, all the way to his climatic "masterwork" (double theft) in Pasadena, which has now been officially re-credited to James Tyler.