Essex, England Grayson Perry and FAT Architecture A House for Essex This whimsical vacation house is styled as a secular chapel. The strange brief was requested by Living Architecture, a nonprofit that commissions notable architects and rents the buildings to the public. The house, designed by artist Grayson Perry and now-disbanded architecture firm FAT, mixes formal and informal, sacred and nonreligious precedents, canonizing a fictional local woman by using architectural details. These include the eclectic symbols on the exterior's green and white tiles, each of which represents aspects of her identity, and tapestries inside that commemorate events in her life.

Cantilevered almost 100 feet to the main avenue of Expo 2015 Milan, the canopy of the Russian Federation Pavilion dramatically invites visitors into the building's exhibition space.

Open since May 1, this tightly packed world's fair of architectural hits and misses runs through October 31. UK Pavilion by Tristan Simmonds in collaboration with BDP and Stage One. The first world exposition, held in London in 1851, occupied Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace. But during the last century, expos (also called world's fairs) evolved into collections of national pavilions that competed for attention with novel and grandiose building designs. The Shanghai Expo in 2010 kicked off the “Asian century” with a show of architectural pyrotechnics that reportedly attracted 73 million visitors. The theme of Expo 2015 in Milan is