With more than $33 billion in its asset trust endowment, the Gates Foundation is the wealthiest charitable entity in the world. But it wanted to send the right message with the architecture of its new home: bold but not arrogant, global but also a good neighbor.

In addition to designing the Girubuntu school, MASS Design Group founders Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks helped select its site, get approvals, and build the organizational infrastructure to support it.

Wang Shu, a 48-year-old Chinese architect whose work explores the intersection of modern technologies and traditional sensibilities, has won the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize, announced Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the prize. Wang is the 37th person to win the prize and the first from China.

In an exhibition he organized at the New Museum in New York City last year, Rem Koolhaas took the preservation movement to task, arguing that it had become an “empire” all too successful at tying the hands of architects and suffocating daring thinking.

A muscular concrete structure in Denver provides a calm and fluid environment for appreciating the work of a maverick 20th-century artist.

Commissioned to design a small suite of offices in a noisy cardboard factory near Ben Gurion Airport, in Israel, architect Irit Axelrod decided to create an interior that asserts a sense of 'quiet power.'