Designing a museum is nothing new for Zaha Hadid Architects. Creating one on top of Mount Kronplatz in northern Italy is something else entirely.

A graffiti-covered factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, may not seem the most likely of venues for classical music.

"Everything I do is aimed at dynamizing my work,” Carme Pinós declares, “because dynamism communicates lightness.”

Dramatically framed by Morphosis’s glassy Federal Building looming behind it, the revived Strand theater, a gleaming red experimental performance space and education center for the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, clicks into its site on San Francisco’s Market Street like one of the final pieces of a complex puzzle.

Herzog & de Meuron recently unveiled their concept for a new art museum, the Pritzker-winning firm’s first project in Canada, to provide a home for the expanding Vancouver Art Gallery.

Commissioned to create a public artwork as part of a housing-project renovation in Copenhagen, poet Morten Søndergaard sought to express the individuality of the residents in counterpoint to the anonymity of the architecture.

The Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz station lies 60 feet under the inner city of Leipzig, yet architect Max Dudler, who is based in Zürich, Frankfurt, and Berlin, wanted to create the impression that this public space is flooded with daylight.

The New Bodleian Library in the historic center of Oxford had for years been so unfashionable as to be all but invisible. Designed in the mid-1930s by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880–1960) in a stripped-down classical style, and not completed until 1946, it was already a throwback at a time when modernism was rising. 

There’s a disconnect that runs through your mind when you set foot inside the Forum, an addition to Marvin Hall, the School of Architecture, Design & Planning at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.