This could be called one of the toughest renovation jobs imaginable.

Blunt, thickset, elemental––these are your first impressions, having turned through the close neighborhood streets of Firminy and come upon the Eglise Saint-Pierre Firminy-Vert in the widening expanse of its suburban setting.

Rand Elliott, FAIA, drives his white Porsche 911 around Oklahoma City, showing you his major projects, shifting gears, and sweeping through the sprawling landscape so quickly, authoritatively, you begin to understand how important the new Chesapeake Boathouse is to the career of this consummate Oklahoma architect.

Richärd + Bauer, a young Phoenix-based firm, has demonstrated numerous times in its 11-year history that it can still advance architectural quality in inexpensive institutional buildings.

The Casa das Mudas Centro das Artes, on the Portuguese Island of Madeira, crowns a basalt promontory 600 feet above the Atlantic, but from its entry atop the precipice, the building disappears.

To those who have visited Provincetown, Massachusetts, it would be hard to imagine a 20,000-square-foot institutional building rising up in the middle of that quaint, New England seaside town.

At a time when Americans are deeply divided about the role of government and whether judges should interpret or apply the law, courthouse architecture has become a potential battlefield.

The more successful buildings by Rafael Viñoly, FAIA, display distinct athletic gestures—from the smoothly arcing roof of the 1994 Lehman College Physical Education Facility in New York to the exuberant, glass-barrel-vaulted roof of the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts in Philadelphia.