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.

“In Rio, the landscape comes to you,” Brazilian architect Arthur Casas says about his commission to renovate a penthouse apartment in Rio de Janeiro's Urca neighborhood. Casas, who has an office in São Paulo, plus one in New York City, had quite a landscape to work with.

It can be done: a wheelchair-friendly environment that in no way resembles the typical one. 

Enter Mercato and your first impression is its rawness. The rough concrete, weathered steel, and exposed ductwork might seem out of place in Shanghai, a city where fine-dining interiors tend to be blingy.

For the Relojería Alemana, a watch and jewelry boutique in Majorca’s new Puerto Adriano marina, the Madrid-based studio OHLAB redefines the traditional jewelry store, dissolving barriers between inside and out, as well as between customers and sales staff, to create a gleaming glass-walled salon.

Inserting a precisely detailed retreat for art into a high-rise building in the middle of bustling Hong Kong required some extraordinary measures. In a city like Hong Kong that's largely shaped by its density—where space is tight and often has to be improvised—you can wind up with surreal results.

Four years ago, the quarter-mile-long stretch of land along the Fox River, about a block from downtown Green Bay, Wisconsin, was mostly a simple path and a large empty space behind a mall parking structure.

Dark and neglected 'that's the kind of derelict space that lurks below most highways and elevated roadways. Cities in the process of densifying, however, can no longer afford to ignore such concrete underbellies. Toronto, which has been busy completing 70,000 residential units between 2008 and 2012'mostly condominium apartments'recently opened Underpass Park, a gutsy template that repairs a previously marginalized urban zone in the city's East End neighborhood.