As dazzling as a perfect smile, IWI Orthodontics makes a bold first impression, but its elegant beauty lingers on long after. Filling the fourth floor of an existing building in the heart of Tokyo’s hip Harajuku neighborhood, the clinic specializes in an implant orthodontia system patented by its head doctor. With the goal of creating an equally innovative office space, he hired the New York City—based firm Contemporary Architecture Practice (CAP). The result of their collaboration is a sleek interior that seamlessly merges cutting-edge medical technology with gracious Japanese hospitality. As if greeting guests at a traditional inn, a staff

Standing by the handbag bar at the Louis Vuitton Maison (House of Vuitton) on New Bond Street, in London’s Mayfair district, one can observe a strange kind of tourism. The most multilingual of London sales assistants are available to sell a $4,000 handbag to just about anyone. Wherever these tourists come from, you can bet there is a Louis Vuitton (LV) closer than London. But the new store, with 16,146 square feet of retail space, is intended to be unique. “New Bond Street is the most high-end shopping street in the world,” explains New York City—based Peter Marino, the project’s

Completion Date: January 2009 Owner: Marc Jacobs International Program: An expansion of Marc Jacobs' eighth-floor SoHo showroom onto the floor below, adding new showrooms for ready-to-wear and accessories, offices for sales and public relations, and an office for the company president, for a total of 10,000 square feet. Design concept and solution: The Stephan Jaklitsch team sought to design an environment for buyers and editors continuous with the Marc Jacobs brand. The palette of materials—ebonized wood floors, custom sycamore millwork, nickel vitrines and lighting—recalls the Marc Jacobs stores, as does furniture by Christian Liaigre. Video monitors set into the showroom

Swiss architect Gus Wüstemann defines his design approach as “program-free architecture,” in which “everything that contaminates the space with a program disappears.”

Completion Date: March 2010 Owner: Jeff Herdzina, US DATA Corporation Program: A 5,000-square-foot office for an online data company, with a café, conference room, and gaming lounge. Design concept and solution: The architects wanted to convey the client's technological identity while boosting the office's already close-knit atmosphere. The new design features a large, open bullpen of workstations and a conference room bounded by a glass wall etched with numerical sequences to signify streams of data. A bright green wall, jutting and folding at changing angles, defines the circulation through the office like a kind of origami canopy, and divides the

Completion Date: November 2009 Owner: Denver Art Museum Program: A 4,936-square-foot shop in the lobby of the museum's Daniel Libeskind–designed building. The project, which also includes a café and office, replaces and updates the lobby's original shop. Design concept and solution: The architects aimed to attract more museum patrons while making the store feel like a natural extension of the art-viewing experience. They moved the shop from its original, somewhat obscure location under the main stairs into an underused portion of the lobby near the entrance. Respecting the dramatic angles and skewed geometry of Libeskind's design, the Roth + Sheppard

Ask any seasoned journalist, and he or she will likely confirm that the office environment for a news and media organization needs to support several seemingly incompatible activities, often occurring simultaneously. At any given moment, reporters are gathering information on the phone, impromptu meetings are happening in aisles and corridors, while writers and editors are trying to complete stories on tight deadlines. STUDIOS Architecture grappled with these demands when it designed offices for Dow Jones, the news and financial information provider best known as publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Soon after Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate, News Corporation (News Corp.),

The city of Tashkent just celebrated its 2,200th birthday, but the Uzbek capital, once a stop on the Silk Road, has retained little of its ancient architecture. In 1966, a 5.0-magnitude earthquake mostly leveled the city’s historic center of clay-brick buildings. The Soviet Union rebuilt with modern structures lining wide boulevards. But in the decades since Soviet rule, the Uzbek government has redeveloped the area with an eye toward bringing traditional ornamentation back to the city’s architecture while creating a sophisticated capital that embraces an international brand of contemporary design. One of its recent efforts, the International Forums Palace, anchors

Even before the economy tanked, few would have called the scope of CityCenter anything less than incredibly ambitious.