Helsinki University Library
The rotunda brings in daylight and helps visitors grasp the building's spatial organization at a glance.

Photo © Tuomas Uusheimo

Dartmoor Treehouse
The iconic gable-roofed tree house got an update last August as part of Dartmoor Arts Week, an arts-education program in Drewsteignton, England.

Photo © Michael Smallcombe

Home-for-All
In the wake of the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated the eastern coast of Japan two years ago this month, the small town of Rikuzentakata has looked to the ruins for renewal.

Photo © Iwan Baan

Urban Collage
A social-housing complex outside Paris is a suburban ménage á trios.
Maison Édouard François created an intriguing discourse by stacking single-family residence atop housing block atop townhouse.

Photo © Paul Raftery

Light Pavilion
Chengdu, China
Lebbeus Woods in Collaboration With Christoph A. Kumpusch

Photo © Iwan Baan

New York City, October 31, 2012

Photo by Iwan Baan

Matadero Madrid Art Center
Behind engaging architecture there is tension. Indeed, Rembrandt's famous high-drama juxtapositions of light and dark were the inspiration for the conversion of a century-old slaughterhouse in southern Madrid into a new cultural center and public film archive.

Photo © Fernando Guerra

Arum
The ZHA design team arrived at the floral form with the help of the office's Computation and Design Group (ZHA|CODE) and its research on shell structures-typically concrete forms that retain their shape and support loads without a steel frame.

Photo © Sergio Pirrone

Lagares Showroom
Contemplative and enigmatic, the Lagares Showroom in Girona, Spain, bears greater resemblance to a highbrow gallery installation than a sales floor.

Photo © Hisao Suzuki

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion
Collective memory was the driving force behind the latest incarnation of the annual, temporary Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron and Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei.

Photo © Iwan Baan

Cloud City
Argentinean-born, Frankfurt-based visual artist Tomás Saraceno describes his newest installation, Cloud City, with whimsy and enthusiasm: It is a sundial, a giant solar barbecue, and a spacecraft, he insists.

Photo courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art / © Hyla Skopitz

Shad Thames
Along the narrow cobblestone road of Shad Thames, a bit of preserved Victorian-era Britannia on the south bank of London, the adage “What’s old is new again” rings especially true.

Photo © Rob Telford

Quick Take: A Touch of Glass
A new cultural center for Italian tile manufacturer Bisazza makes a strong case for glass mosaic—outside the powder room.

Photo © Alberto Ferrero / Courtesy Bisazza

Forest Chapel
Wedding venues (and wedding days), so often precious or bombastic, can seldom, if ever, be described as “serene.” But the Forest Chapel, designed by architect Hironaka Ogawa for a company that runs wedding facilities across Japan, is a delicate pavilion in the inland city of Takasaki, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo.

Photo © Daichi Ano

Mirror House
In Copenhagen’s central park of Fælledparken, local architects Mads Lund and Robert Paulsen of MLRP playfully reinterpreted the “house of mirrors” when renovating a 1,400-square-foot, graffiti-covered shed.

Photo © Laura Stamer

Forest of Hope
Altos de Cazucá, a neighborhood just outside of Bogotá, developed organically in the 1970s as peasants fled rural areas plagued by the ongoing armed conflict.

Photo courtesy El Equipo de Mazzanti / © Jorge Gamboa

Quick Take: Medellín’s New Money Shot
An open-air escalator in the remote reaches of Medellín's Communa 13 is becoming the new poster child for the city's public works projects.

Photo by Beth Broome

ASM International World Headquarters
Cleveland-based historic property developer The Chesler Group helped return a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome and the John Terence Kelly office building underneath it to its 1959 glory.

Photo: © Jeff Goldberg/Esto

Medina Haram Piazza
When muslims make their pilgrimage to Medina to pray at Islam’s second-holiest mosque, there is now shelter from the extreme sun for the crowds that spill into the surrounding plaza.

Photography courtesy Sefar Architecture

Jane’s Carousel Pavilion
A jewel has been set in the emerald-necklace-like Brooklyn Bridge Park: an acrylic glass pavilion by Pritzker Prize–winning French architect Jean Nouvel.

Photo © Roland Halbe

Your Rainbow Panorama
Rendering Denmark’s second-largest city in 52 colors, artist Olafur Eliasson has perched his permanent installation “Your Rainbow Panorama” on delicate columns 12 feet above the roof of the ARoS Art Museum, in Aarhus.

Photo © Studio Olafur Eliasson

Empty Sky
When the National September 11 Memorial opens at Ground Zero on the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, it will be joined by another commemorative effort, across the Hudson River, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Dubbed “Empty Sky,” this monument by Frederic Schwartz Architects honors the 744 men and women who hailed from the state and lost their lives on 9/11.

Photo © David Sundberg/Esto

Metropol Parasol
“We have a saying in our office,” says Andre Santer, project architect at Berlin-based J. Mayer H. Architects. “Democracy follows form.” The “form” to which Santer refers is the firm’s Metropol Parasol, an exuberant, 140,000-square-foot and 94-foot-high glue-laminated timber structure that has sprouted over the Plaza de la Encarnación in Seville, Spain.

Photography © David Franck

Subdivided Columns
Evoking the creations of a brilliant, futuristic insect, architect Michael Hansmeyer’s fantastical extrapolation of classical columns leaves no smooth surface untouched.

Photo courtesy Michael Hansmeyer/Hochparterre

Twirl
Twirl, an installation by Zaha Hadid Architects on display for two weeks during the 50th anniversary of the Milan Furniture Fair in April, was intended to be a contemporary interpretation of the State University of Milan’s 18th-century courtyard.

Photo courtesy Lea Ceramiche © Andrea Martiradonna

reOrder
When Brooklyn-based design and fabrication shop Situ Studio was installing reOrder at the Brooklyn Museum in late February, it looked as though their team was fashioning enormous Victorian skirts for the classical columns in the McKim, Mead & White–designed Great Hall.

Photo © Keith Sirchio

Teshima Art Museum
A one-room gallery on a remote Japanese island behaves like a work of art.

Photo © Iwan Baan

A Floating Pool Drops Anchor in Brooklyn
Swimming in New York City’s East River has never been so alluring. Late last June, a barge hauling its unusual cargo of a 25-meter, seven-lane swimming pool moored along the Brooklyn waterfront and, since then, has hosted tens of thousands of New Yorkers looking to escape the summer heat.

Photo: © Philippe Baumann