Tucked tight against Switzerland's border with both France and Germany, Basel is a small city that has made room for big business.

An architectural tour of Basel and its environs reveals no fewer than 21 completed buildings by the office of natives Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, with a major addition to the city's convention center and a 213-foot office tower for Novartis slated for 2013 and 2015 completion, respectively.

In the Pantheon of Building Types, the parking garage lurks somewhere in the vicinity of prisons and toll plazas.

National Stadium lies beyond Beijing’s Fourth Ring Road, at the northern end of the imperial axis that cuts through Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.

You expect clinics to look, well, clinical—Modernist, austerely immaculate boxes, hygienically white inside and out.