The new East Building seen from Fine Arts Drive (north façade). As the only permanent structure built for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis—an event which looms large in the collective consciousness of the city to this day—the Cass Gilbert-designed Palace of Fine Arts, later known as the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), persists as a cultural and architectural icon. The handsome neoclassical pile sits atop a rolling hill in the town’s beloved Forest Park, where admission through its porticoed main entrance to view an encyclopedic collection has remained free for over a century. Needless to say, alterations to

The Swiss have long held a reputation for creating products of impeccable precision. Tilo Herlach, Simon Hartmann, and Simon Frommenwiler, partners in the Basel-based HHF Architects, have found early international success by turning that stereotype on its head.

St. Louis is a city of brick. That most traditional of materials clads the majority of structures in this midwestern metropolis, including the academic buildings on Harris-Stowe State University’s (HSSU) small midtown campus.

Pierre Thibault's pared-down architecture for a new abbey outside Montreal connects relocated monks with nature.

Many museum buildings have incorporated systems that allow daylight to illuminate their galleries, but none as robustly as MAXXI, where almost every roof surface is glazed. To support such a roof above the museum’s winding galleries, whose bays average 40 feet wide, reinforced-concrete walls on either side sandwich a series of trusses. While these trusses run parallel to the gallery walls, transversal steel beams connect the walls. Originally conceived as a precast-concrete element, each of these longitudinal sections, typically six per bay, is composed of a steel truss encased in 1⁄2-inch-thick fiberglass-reinforced concrete panels. The nearly 8-foot-deep assembly, which rises

Image courtesy Foreign Office Architects Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, rendering. Click here to view images. Talk to most architects in Ohio and they’ll tell you it’s a pretty conservative place. But while design innovation may be a hard sell for local architects, the state has had an astonishing track record in the last decade for giving cutting-edge foreign architects their first shot at building on American soil, arguably more so than more “forward-thinking” locales on either coast. When the Toledo Museum of Art picked this year’s Pritzker Prize winner, SANAA, to design an ethereal Glass Pavilion in 2000, it

Images courtesy Hans Hollein Click here to view images. Hans Hollein tried something new by doing something old. For nearly half a century, the prolific architect has been building around the world, though he is probably best known for the groundbreaking, and sometimes controversial, projects he completed in his native Vienna decades ago. For a recent competition entry for an office building in Shenzhen, China, the Pritzker Prize winner searched his archive of drawings, focusing on a series of sketches he did in his twenties while traveling through the United States on a Harkness Fellowship. A year spent in Chicago

Tom Phifer said that he wants his new building for the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA), in Raleigh, to disappear into the landscape.