From the first glimpse of the $103 million Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, the metaphor is unambiguous.

Instead of the boxlike apartment and commercial towers in cities everywhere, architect Yansong Ma, principal of Beijing-based MAD, prefers structures that are “organic and soft.”

Preston Scott Cohen, architect of the recently opened expansion to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, refers to the addition’s exterior as “the urban version” of the building’s Lightfall—the spiraling skylit atrium and circulation space that vertically connects the new galleries.

The atrium, or Lightfall, inside the just-completed Amir Building addition to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art serves much the same purpose as the space at the heart of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Seen from the flat plaza that wraps around it on two sides, Preston Scott Cohen's radical addition to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art strikes a geometrically independent pose.

There is no denying that One World Trade Center (WTC), the 104-story tower now rising at the northern end of the Ground Zero site, is a tremendously ambitious commercial real estate venture.

“Humble” seems an unlikely word to associate with an architect who, at 36, has already built three inventive apartment complexes on his home turf of Copenhagen, has a high-profile commission for another in New York City, and is the darling of the design blogosphere.