Designing a new interior for a building as prominent as Charles Garnier's historic opera house isn't for the faint-hearted.

Owner: Obscura Digital Completion Date: December 2010 (main interior), July 2011 (ScreenWall) Program: A three-story, 36,000-square-foot headquarters for an interactive media company, with a large multifunctional showroom and exhibition area, prototyping workshop spaces, workstations for digital production, offices, and a conference room. The project is an adaptive reuse of a 1940s concrete and steel-frame warehouse in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. IwamotoScott's office shares the building, with an office on the second floor. Design concept and solution: The architects set out to give Obscura Digital a raw yet more refined version of their previous headquarters, a warehouse on Bryant

A 9,600-square-foot office for Rottet Studio's Los Angeles practice.

'You once wrote that Modernists couldn't do front doors, so I've tried to prove you wrong,' says architect Ian Moore, as he pivots the massive milk-glass front door to admit me from the street.

David Rockwell's new film center invigorates the Film Society of Lincoln Center with first-rate screening rooms, a caf', and a cinema shop.

Many Architects shun the notion of decoration—less is more and all that.

There is a misconception among many designers that the top floor of a department store may as well be Siberia. Retailers tend to banish offices up there, far from quick-selling items like cosmetics and handbags on lower floors. After more than a decade designing upper-level hospitality and retail spaces like the OXO Tower Restaurant for Harvey Nichols in London and a dining/food hall emporium for Milan’s La Rinascente, architecture firm Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands (LDS) sees opportunity in the heights. “Most architects don’t understand that the retailer constantly changes what happens on the floor,” says Paul Sandilands, a director at the

Fusing Art And Architecture, fine artists Edward Lam and Deborah Moss frequently collaborate with architects, interior designers, and other clients to make custom, richly detailed works of art'many of them for international restaurants, hotels, and established retailers such as Sofitel and Louis Vuitton. When commissioned by the South Korean department store Lotte to fill a central atrium in its Seoul emporium, the partners and founders of the Toronto-based design studio created a dazzling seven-story mobile made of reflective gold and silver butterflies, crystals, and glass beads. The atrium, Lam explains, brings light and air down into spaces that are frequently