Like the institution it serves, the new early-childhood learning center of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools is anything but ordinary.

A four-story, 17,000-square-foot addition to the kindergarten- to eighth-grade Erie Elementary School’s existing quarters in a former Catholic school in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Maria Montessori wrote, “Education is a natural process carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words, but by experiences in the environment.”

Built in 1914, the four-story industrial building at 1500 Barclay Street in Baltimore’s North Central Historic District was innovative for its time, with expanses of glass and a unique ventilation system designed by the architect, Otto G. Simonson, to improve working conditions.

For 70 years, a square in the northern quarter of Warsaw has been a site of strife and conflict, memory and mourning.

For the general public, the Kimbell Art Museum’s exalted reputation rests on the extraordinarily high quality of its small collection, with hundreds of firstrate pieces by Western painters and sculptors, and a growing cache of Asian and pre-Columbian work.

A building within a building, the Ando Museum celebrates work on the Inland Sea island of Naoshima by one of Japan’s most influential architects.

Golden, Colorado, about 20 miles west of Denver, is probably best known for a certain beer brewed in a massive plant on the city’s eastern edge.

Although located in dense West Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania has a genuine campus—one organized around a series of green spaces and landscaped quadrangles carved out of the surrounding urban fabric.

Architects don’t often get to design a new building for their alma mater. Yet Thomas Phifer, based in New York City, showed it’s possible to go home again—with success.