Firms working everywhere from China to Saudi Arabia have to navigate the often grandiose ambitions of authoritarian regimes.

The Modules want you to know how they were built. A privately owned student apartment building a few blocks from Temple University’s campus in North Philadelphia, the project touts its prefabricated construction in its branding.

A rough-and-ready storefront in a former auto shop turns up the volume for a renegade wine producer.

The village of Gando is more than a three-hour drive from the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, on occasionally unpaved roads that thread through a landscape of scorched orange dust and isolated trees buffeted by sub-Saharan winds.

 Its critics called it a “bridge to nowhere”—borrowing an epithet popularized by Sarah Palin—and it endured 15 years of civic wrangling, but a new span designed by Santiago Calatrava was finally welcomed by the city of Dallas with an opening party that took over its roadway on Friday night.