Art breaks the rules” is an idea Pomona College’s art faculty hoped its new building would convey, recalls department chair Michael O’Malley.

It’s an urban oasis, an indoor landscape, and an effective solution to brand a university campus otherwise lost in the chaos of downtown Toronto. Designed by Snøhetta in collaboration with local firm Zeidler Partnership Architects, Ryerson University’s new Student Learning Centre is an audacious bid to redefine the concept of an inner-city student commons. “The program is amazingly open,” says project architect Michael Cotton, of Snøhetta’s New York office. “It’s almost like a 10-story lobby. Sometimes we call it a library without books.” 

The City College of New York (CCNY) is a bit like an academic Acropolis. Situated in Upper Manhattan on one of the island’s highest points, its collection of early 20th-century neo-Gothic buildings, by George B. Post—and more recent additions by architects that include Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Rafael Viñoly—sit high above the surrounding neighborhood of townhouses and low-scale apartment buildings.

In developing the ceramic facade for a revamped studio-art wing for Macalester College’s Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center, the architects at Minneapolis-based firm HGA started to feel as if they had enrolled in an art class of their own.

When Michel Rojkind calls Highpark “extroverted,” you might think, “It takes one to know one.” An exuberant character, the Mexico City–based architect is rarely at a loss for words or enthusiasm. His new housing project in Monterrey, a major industrial and business center in northeast Mexico, shares his outgoing personality—engaging its urban context and striking an animated profile on the street. 

A distinctive new building in Winnipeg fosters community and honors the local mood.

The revitalization of Downtown Los Angeles remains a work in progress, with the area still a patchwork of commercial and residential towers, government and cultural facilities, light manufacturing, and parking lots. Lately, its momentum has turned to its eastern fringe, a once-industrial area now dubbed the Arts District. 

An abandoned sandstone quarry on Rainberg Mountain, above the historic city of Salzburg, Austria, is hardly the place one would expect to find a desirable urban neighborhood. 

Aficionados of the musical West Side Story will know the New York neighborhood Lincoln Square, once called San Juan Hill, as the backdrop for the clashes between the Jets and the Sharks. But in real life, this is the part of Manhattan’s West Side that was bulldozed in the 1960s to make way for the performing-arts complex Lincoln Center.

Chicago’s gentrifying River North neighborhood is a gritty mix of older commercial and newer residential buildings. Among these is 747 North Clark Street, a 22,000-­square-foot condominium completed last year.