For a small, private educational institution, Colby College has assembled a formidable cache of American art, including work by John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, John Marin, and Alex Katz, among others.

Wrapped in facades of concrete, etched with the fragments of enlarged sketches, the Tchoban Foundation Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin exploits the craft of construction to celebrate the art of drawing.

In the picturesque Austrian village of Erl, just east of the German border, where the rugged Alps seem to descend from the heavens to meet the undulating valley below, a striking, angular structure, the Tyrolean Festspielhaus, or Festival Hall, pierces the landscape that inspired it.

Designing an addition to an Alvar Aalto building is hard enough—try doing it with five other Aalto structures hovering nearby, in a Finnish town whose identity has been indelibly linked to the master since the 1960s.

Jeju may seem an unlikely place to pioneer a new form of structural expressionism in office architecture.

Making a Splash: Designed by MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects, a public aquatic center, surrounded by a park in a mixed-income city housing development, proves public recreational facilities needn't skimp on high-concept design.

Of the many neoclassical buildings that architect John Galen Howard designed for the University of California, Berkeley, in the early twentieth century, California Memorial Stadium was perhaps the most breathtaking and the most imperiled: from its perch at the base of the Berkeley foothills, the concrete structure—part coliseum, part amphitheater dug into the hillside—offered 73,000 Golden Bears fans sweeping views of San Francisco Bay to the west, but on a site straddling the Hayward Fault.

Though it isn't quite all tumbleweed and Longhorns on the 20-minute drive from downtown Austin to the Circuit of the Americas (COTA)—the only facility in the United States specifically built to host the Formula 1 Grand Prix auto race—the barren landscape looks and feels like rural Texas.