The medal was first awarded in 1848 to Charles Robert Cockerell, and its winners include some of the most influential architects of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Eug??ne Viollet-le-Duc (1864), Frank Lloyd Wright (1941), Le Corbusier (1953), Walter Gropius (1956), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1959) and Buckminster Fuller (1968).