The remote, rural town of Frommern, in Germany’s Black Forest, is hardly the place one expects to encounter finely crafted works of architecture.

Eclectic and eccentric, with influences that range from Islamic to Celtic to Japanese, the Veteran’s Room at the Park Avenue Armory was reopened to the public in March as an intimate space for lectures and recitals.

A spiraling staircase is the centerpiece of the new Barney’s Chelsea.

The CKK Jordanki concert hall emerges like an outcrop of weathered rock from an urban park in Toruń, in northern Poland. Its Spanish architect, Fernando Menis, has yoked such imagery to local architectural references and technical ingenuity to establish a strong character for the building while deferring to its sensitive setting on the edge of the medieval Old Town.

For a new café, an architect re-engineers the DNA of the California Academy of Sciences next door.

Fortresslike power plants are usually perceived as an intrusion on the visual environment. But the San Francisco utility giant PG&E has long taken exception to that truism.