A rough-and-ready storefront in a former auto shop turns up the volume for a renegade wine producer.

It is in the nature of tall buildings that rankings are short-lived, but at least for the moment, the 1,354-foot-tall, 77-story Al Hamra Firdous Tower, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), is the tallest building in Kuwait City.

Artist Doug Aitken first visited the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2009, on the invitation of its director Richard Koshalek to conceive an entirely mirrored reading room in the lower lobby.

“Putting light on a building is not about just putting light on a building,” explains Focus Lighting principal Paul Gregory.

Art imitates life in surprising ways. For Miami residents hurrying through the lobby of the city’s 1985 Stephen P. Clark Government Center lobby, Reflect, a permanent, interactive installation by artist Ivan Toth Depeña, does it by capturing their movements in real time, and transforming them into dynamic video paintings that illuminate the building’s columns with vivid moving pixels.

Working out of an office in Boston's financial district — inaccessible to the public and incapable of holding large public functions — the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) wanted a change of scene.

With more than $33 billion in its asset trust endowment, the Gates Foundation is the wealthiest charitable entity in the world. But it wanted to send the right message with the architecture of its new home: bold but not arrogant, global but also a good neighbor.