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After the overreaching of Modern city planning—barren plazas, rows of soulless apartment slabs—urban design got a bad rap.

Virginia Tech architecture student Christopher Morgan has won an international competition to design the Yéle Music Studio in the Cité Soleil area of Port-au-Prince. Launched last December, prior to the deadly January 12 earthquake, the competition invited students from around the globe to create a music facility that empowered a Haitian community. The Royal Institute of British Architects, along with architecture firm John McAslan + Partners and developer Allied London, sponsored the competition on behalf of Yéle Haiti, a nonprofit organization founded in 2005 by Haiti-born musician Wyclef Jean. The winner was announced in May. Click on the slide show

The Trenton Bath House, just restored by Farewell Mills Gatsch, respects Louis Kahn’s original design, even if his full vision remains unrealized. To many architects, Louis Kahn’s 1955 Trenton Bath House in Ewing, New Jersey, just restored by Farewell Mills Gatsch Architects (FMG), exudes everything that worked in 20th-century architecture. This concise design for the Jewish Community Center in a Trenton suburb engages in a thoughtful dialogue with history using modest materials. But the Bath House also is a disappointment. It began crumbling soon after completion, and Kahn’s larger civic vision for the site proved too idealized for the clients

A little-known building in Aspen, Colorado, designed by the late Chicago architect Harry Weese—whose most celebrated work is the Washington, D.C., Metro system—is threatened with demolition. Built in 1972, Weese’s Given Institute is a small concrete-block conference center owned by the University of Colorado School of Medicine. The 12,000-square-foot structure sits on a 2.25-acre lot in Aspen’s pricey West End residential neighborhood. For years, the medical school has used the institute for summer conferences and retreats, but faced with ongoing budget cuts, it now plans to close the Given and sell the property. School officials are negotiating with a potential

In 1947, a visionary named Eero Saarinen won an architectural competition to design what would become his best-known structure, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Image courtesy Jefferson National Expansion Memorial A landmark project will breathe new life into the riverfront park 630 ft below the top of the St. Louis Arch. In September, the winner of a similar competition will be revealed. This time, the landmark project will breathe new life into the riverfront park 630 ft below the top of Saarinen’s famous stainless steel, inverted catenary arch. Five international teams have made it to the finals of the

Image courtesy Edward M. Kennedy Institute Gehry is designing a $60 million new home for the Signature Theatre Company. The theater will be located inside a new glass tower by Arquitectonica and Ismael Leyva Architects. New York City’s Signature Theatre Company has added some star power to its line-up: Frank Gehry. The Los Angeles-based architect is designing a $60 million permanent home for the 19-year-old, off-Broadway theater company inside a glass tower now rising at West 42nd Street and 10th Avenue, one block east of Signature’s current location. The theater company originally had planned to move to a freestanding venue

From a distance, interfere(nce) looks like an abstract sculpture. Step closer, though, and the plywood structure’s irregular openings tempt you to step inside to examine its sloped walls and jaggedly framed views of the surrounding fields and forest. Is it sculpture or architecture? That isn’t an easy question to answer, which is why interfere(nce) is the perfect debut piece for Architecture Omi, a program in Ghent, New York, devoted to fostering work that probes the intersection of architecture, sculpture, and landscape. Photo © Oliver Kruse The first piece installed at the Architecture Omi park was interfere(nce), designedby Oliver Kruse and

Photo courtesy Forrec Related Links: Inside Beijing’s Bubble Box National Swimming Center Earlier this month, after almost a year of reconstruction, what is being touted as Asia’s largest water park opened inside the bubble-like ETFE walls of Beijing’s National Aquatics Center. The building, commonly known as the Water Cube, was designed by Australian architecture firm PTW and China Construction Design International as the site of aquatics events during the 2008 Olympic Games. It still contains pools for recreational swimming and competition, but now it also houses a 140,000-square-foot leisure hall created by Toronto-based planning and design firm Forrec. The park

Photo © Patrick McMullan Co. Playwright June Finfer Some years back the Chicago-based playwright and filmmaker June Finfer discovered stories about architecture to be packed with drama, and increasingly focused on this topic in her work. Her play, The Glass House, a quasi-fictional account of the story behind Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, has been staged at various venues, including the terrace of the Farnsworth House. Most recently, the Resonance Ensemble company performed a short, sold-out run in New York City. Finfer hopes the play will be presented at other theaters across the U.S.; in the meantime, she’s