At the heart of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, a new public recreation area updates and restores a section of the borough's revered green space.

A firm transforms Mexico's national cinema into a bustling, sexy civic hub. The joke goes like this: the person handing out woven mats for visitors to sit on while watching outdoor film screenings on the lawn of Mexico City's Cineteca Nacional is said to ask young couples if they would like one mat, or—lilting into a suggestive tone—two.

A sleek and seemingly simple glass-and-aluminum volume encloses a high-tech theater devoted to keeping classics current

A rower crouches with her knees tucked below her fists, then dips her oars in the water and pulls back. The lines of the oars sketch an elegant V in the air, which is repeated over and over as the slender boat cuts through the water. Jeanne Gang thought about such movement when she started designing the WMS Boathouse at Clark Park in Chicago.

Architect Ben van Berkel of Amsterdam-based firm UNStudio used a unique pinwheel plan to design the Ardmore Residence, creating a new architectural icon in Singapore.

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.