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Cerebral and fluent in the language of ideas, William O'Brien, Jr. has moved skillfully within academia and the art scene while slowly establishing a practice that will allow him to build too.

Jon Lott, the principal of New York'based Para-Project, says he wants the firm's work to allure while raising questions. “Ambiguity, distortion, and estrangement are essential tools for me,” says the architect, who cofounded the practice months after graduating with his M.Arch. from Harvard's Graduate School of Design in 2005.

Often lost among the headlines about China's astonishing development—not least those covering its government's latest proposal to urbanize an additional 400 million people over the next decade—has been a growing interest in the corresponding transformation of the Chinese countryside.

At first glance, the work of Marc Fornes, founder of Brooklyn-based Marc Fornes/TheVeryMany, seems more like sculpture than architecture.

Many architects make names for themselves by experimenting with building materials. But Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, the married couple who ditched budding careers in New York to form Oyler Wu Collaborative in Los Angeles nearly 10 years ago

The theme of circling, flowing movement runs through every project by Grupo Aranea. Based in the coastal city of Alicante in southeastern Spain, the studio is led by architect Francisco Leiva Ivorra and his wife, landscape architect Marta García Chico, who draw inspiration from curving natural forms.

Using raw primary materials such as concrete and galvanized steel, simple forms, and an adroit manipulation of scale, the Madrid-based architect Héctor Fernández Elorza gives even small projects a monumental authority.

How did a phone call to Paris launch an architecture firm in Seoul? “It was kind of destiny,” says JOHO Architecture principal Jeonghoon Lee.

Growing up in a planned community on the edge of Osaka, Japan, Akihisa Hirata dreamed of becoming either a biologist or an architect.

By Witold Rybczynski, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2013, 368 pages, $27. Sense and Sensibility in Design Today At several points throughout his new book, Witold Rybczynski invokes Steen Eiler Rasmussen's classic text Experiencing Architecture (1959). Rybczynski, until recently professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has served as an architectural critic for an array of publications. When he studied architecture in the late 1960s at McGill University, he tells us one of his teachers was a Rasmussen disciple. In How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit, Rybczynski follows faithfully the central tenets of his predecessor. Both books organize architectural design into