A city in Belgium aspires to make it onto Europe's cultural map with an energetic building that ramps up the architectural volume. Once a medieval city on a hill in the French-speaking part of Belgium, Mons later became a center of heavy industry.

An inventive new library, in a park with a greenmarket, aims to be a beacon for a challenged community. The Pico Branch Library, a recent work by Koning Eizenberg (KE), is the first new public library branch in Santa Monica, California, in nearly 60 years.

HOK's Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center (ARTIC) launches the automobile-centric Southern California city into a new age of public transporation. When the City of Anaheim launched a design competition in 2009 for a new transit hub, city leaders wanted an iconic structure.

An open-plan, single-room branch library lends books and serves as a place for a young and diverse community to come together.

The creation of a new airport for an emerging Canadian town provides a welcome portal for world trade and recreation.

A coastal community ravaged by Hurricane Ike rebuilds one of its fire stations with an eye toward the next storm. Don't let the miles of seaside kitsch fool you: Galveston, Texas, is no ordinary beach town.

The military does not leap to mind as the most likely patron of distinguished design. But the Colonel James Nesmith Readiness Center, a new facility for the 162nd Engineer Company of the Oregon National Guard, in Dallas, Oregon, could change that thinking.

The Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility, designed by Selldorf Architects, speaks volumes about the future of waste management in urban environments.

Diplomatic Position: In the midst of the visual hubbub of China's third-largest city, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill creates an understated ensemble of buildings for the U.S. Consulate General. The U.S. Consulate General in Guangzhou, China, makes only the quietest of claims within the city's noisy new business district. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), its seven low-rise buildings—offices, screening facilities, a warehouse, and a residence for Marines—dot a 7.4-acre site in the burgeoning Pearl River New Town. Zaha Hadid's opera house lies catercorner to it, and Wilkinson Eyre's supertall IFC Guangzhou and KPF's soon-to-be-supertaller CTF Guangzhou are close by.