Ban’s system, used extensively following Japan’s 2011 earthquake, has now been installed in two shelters—with more planned across Eastern Europe.

“It is much better to be good than to be original,” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously advised his protégé Philip Johnson.

The CKK Jordanki concert hall emerges like an outcrop of weathered rock from an urban park in Toruń, in northern Poland. Its Spanish architect, Fernando Menis, has yoked such imagery to local architectural references and technical ingenuity to establish a strong character for the building while deferring to its sensitive setting on the edge of the medieval Old Town.