In the pages of RECORD, we like to explore a work of architecture not only for the strength of its design but for the impact on its surroundings. In this issue, we look at several new cultural projects that are having a profound effect on urban sites. Steven Holl's controversial addition to the Glasgow School of Art, opposite Charles Rennie Mackintosh's early 20th-century masterpiece, brings a sense of lightness—with its luminous translucent glass skin—to that gritty Scottish city, where it rains more than half the year. In Mexico City, David Chipperfield designed the Jumex Museum to stand up to its bigger and noisier neighbors, especially the shiny, curvaceous Soumaya Museum, which towers over it. Chipperfield's building shows its teeth—with a jagged roofline and the powerful solidity of its travertine cladding—as well as its generosity, with an expansive opening to a new civic plaza that is part of the scheme. In the heart of Los Angeles, Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis have created the architectural equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster for Emerson College, with a mélange of vibrant forms embraced by an enormous frame, which brings a jolt of new life to an anonymous stretch of Sunset Boulevard.

Speaking of Hollywood, one of my all-time favorite movies is Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 romantic thriller, Notorious. In the film, Ingrid Bergman agrees to infiltrate a cabal of Nazis in Brazil; and as she and U.S. intelligence agent Cary Grant fly to Rio de Janeiro, they (and the audience) see the city's dramatic beauty from the air. It was from that aerial view that Le Corbusier, who loved planes, said he sketched his snaking urban plan for Rio (never realized) in 1929. Of course, down on the ground, the city (and “its violent and sublime landscape,” as Le Corbusier called it) was—and is—very different.