While Rennes, the capital of France's Brittany region, does not make most travel guides' must-see lists, the university town of 200,000 still has its charms: crooked medieval streets lined with half-timbered buildings, stately 18th-century edifices, and cafés that spill out onto picturesque squares.

It's safe to say that the San Francisco Planning Commission never envisioned a bay window like the ones architect Anne Fougeron created for the Flip House.

The cloud has an image problem. The term — which refers to the distributed networks of servers that store data and power all kinds of Internet services — gets tossed around a lot, but it doesn't evoke much beyond a vague nimbus of Amazon orders and MP3 files.

Over several decades of designing together, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have steadfastly emphasized the serene and assured manipulation of spaces, planes, and materials, and exhibited an impeccable sense of craft.

'It is special and ordinary at the same time,' says architect Annabelle Selldorf while standing on West 20th Street in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.

Everything inside Downtown—a buzzing hotel, hostel, restaurant, and retail complex in the center of Mexico City —has a story.

For the Renaissance Barcelona Fira Hotel, sited near a convention center on the highway to the city's airport, Jean Nouvel took on the challenge of making meaningful architecture out of what Rem Koolhaas famously defined as “junkspace“—the anonymous, generic sprawl that rings cities everywhere.

Neri&Hu finds a number of innovative ways to reinterpret old China for the 21st century.

Iconic designs don't always make good places. Photogenic buildings that assert themselves as individual landmarks may ignore their context and fail to enhance the public realm.