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In Hamburg, a former Nazi bunker has reopened with an unlikely new program as a sustainable-energy facility.

By Françoise Astorg Bollack. Monacelli, 2013, 224 pages, $50. Second Lives for Old Structures Faced with the prospect of the gradual degradation of the buildings that are our architectural heritage, designers need to reconsider their focus on the heroic model of practice, with its emphasis on idiosyncratic form-making and new construction. Instead, they should look to “the creative possibilities of preservation,” says Françoise Bollack. Pursuing these possibilities while celebrating modernity and producing conceptually powerful work is the focus of her book Old Buildings, New Forms. In it, Bollack posits that, “an old building is not an obstacle but rather a

By John Fernández and Paulo Ferrão. MIT Press, 2013, 264 pages, $35. Helping Cities Go Green In 2012, officials in Dubai asserted that their city would rank among the most sustainable metropolises in the world by 2020. About the same time, Washington, D.C., Mayor Vincent Grey trumpeted greenest-city status by 2032. A glimpse of the cities' sustainability plans shows two different approaches to the same goal. For Dubai, it means supplying five percent of electricity photovoltaically and outlawing energy-hog buildings. While Washington also aims for renewable-energy use and efficient structures, it prioritizes cleaning up the Anacostia River and increasing urban

A combination museum and funeral hall, the Teshima Yokoo House is the latest addition to the collection of art venues being developed on islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea under the aegis of the Fukutake Foundation.

By Anthony M. Townsend. W.W. Norton, October 2013, 400 pages, $29. Brave New World Anthony Townsend started thinking about the intersection of technology and cities before the rest of us knew such a place existed. Back in 2002, when carrying a telephone in your pocket still felt slightly cutting-edge, Townsend, with the volunteer labor of civic hackers and donated equipment, was helping to blanket New York City's Bryant Park with 10 acres of free wireless Internet. Today, Townsend is a research director at the Institute for the Future and a fellow at NYU's Rudin Center for Transportation, and the rest

Marc Fornes’s NonLin/Lin Pavilion appears lacy anddelicate.

Exploiting the bounty of local building products as well as a regional tradition of craft, Monterrey, Mexico'based S-AR is amassing a rugged, though subtly refined, body of work that reflects the city around them.