The longtime home of the Swiss National Museum, or Landesmuseum, in Zurich, is a stolid 19th-century pile.

Among the dozens of temporary installations erected at this summer’s weeklong Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, Tangential Dreams—an undulant timber tower designed by French architect Arthur Mamou-Mani—was a celebration of mathematics, teamwork, and free spirit.

One of the first completed projects from Zaha Hadid’s office since her untimely death, at 65 in March this year, the new Port House on the sprawling docks of Antwerp, Belgium, is a bravura, if distinctly eccentric work.