A 'windcatcher' is a centuries-old Persian technology featuring a tower that takes advantage of natural ventilation by capturing and cooling air. Hank Louis, founder of DesignBuildBLUFF, the University of Utah/University of Colorado, Denver design-build studio, recognized the merits of this simple solution for a recently completed Navajo family home. The house features a tower made of compressed earth bricks with four openings around the top. As the wind blows through the slits, wet blankets (moistened by a drip line) chill the air that then circulates around the home. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) helped the students engineer the tower,

Image courtesy BNIM The twister that pummeled Tuscaloosa on April 27, 2011, killed more than 50 people and left a trail of destruction a mile wide and more than five miles long. The city's plan for rebuilding calls for neighborhoodscaled commercial centers, improvements to several city parks, and the construction of new municipal facilities like police and fire stations. The scheme also includes a recreation trail that doubles as storm-water-management infrastructure. This greenway dubbed the 'Citywalk,' follows the scar left by the tornado, preserving it as a 'path of remembrance and recovery,' explains Stephen Hardy, BNIM associate principal. ARCHITECT: BNIM

In the early 1920s, Adolph and Elisabeth Winters, recent German 'migr's, hired a little-known San Francisco architect, Albert W. Cornelius, to design a center for ballroom dancing, concerts, and the occasional boxing match, in downtown Richmond, California. The Beaux-Arts structure became known as the Winters Building and, over the years, housed retail space and a bank. But by 1973, when the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts took up residence in part of the building, much of it had fallen into disrepair: Its roofs leaked, its ceilings were low, and the first level's stalwart concrete face gave it the

Photo © David Wakely A city-commissioned, 25,000-square-foot community sports center aiming for LEED Silver (top) takes its stylistic cues from a nearby shipping company's unadorned HQ. Sustainable materials and features (solar-thermal panels, rainwater-collecting bioswales, a solar-heat-gain-reducing brise soleil) prove green can be fun while providing a haven for kids and the elderly. ARCHITECT: ELS Architecture and Urban Design BUDGET: $20 million CONTEXT: In a neighborhood notorious for drug- and gang-related activity, the building allows respite and recreation on a site once proposed for a sports center for San Francisco's unsuccessful 2012 Olympics bid. People Client: City of Oakland Architect: ELS

After a deadly tornado tore through Joplin, Missouri last year on May 22, leveling the town’s high school, district officials pledged to be ready for the regularly scheduled start of the academic year—less than three months away.

Long-term residents of an informal community in danger of being priced out of a district of metropolitan Santiago are able to stay near schools and jobs owing to the construction of subsidized housing.

The Nueva Esperanza School, which was completed in 2009, attempts to live up to its name'new hope in Spanish'by providing a much-needed one-room schoolhouse for a coastal Ecuadorian community. Simple materials (including locally sourced wood, dried palm fronds, and a minimum of purchased hardware) went into the 387-square-foot thatched-roof building, designed by David Barrag'n and Pascual Gangotena of Quito-based al bordE arquitectos, who were commissioned by one of the school's teachers, and donated their services. Construction was a team effort: Members of the community assisted a team of volunteers and al bordE staffers to finish the building's hexagonal base, walls,

In the low-income, banana-farming community of Shiroles, 140 miles southeast of San Jos', infrastructure and basic amenities are sparse: Before San Jos'based architects Elisa Marin and Manfred Barboza helped establish the Shiroles Rural School in 2009, the closest school was 12 miles away. Government assistance, too, was minimal. Instead, 'we had a lot of support from the community,' says 27-year-old Marin. This support came in both matter and might: parents and other members of the community donated manual labor and building material'timber from the surrounding forest and corrugated metal from a small store about an hour away. The most recent

Cool and urbane, the Fernando Botero Library Park stands sentry on the hillside of San Cristóbal, a rough-edged “urban village” on Medellín’s western fringes. The city’s sixth library-park, it is one of the newest additions to the public building program here, which has garnered worldwide attention in recent years. “It is a difficult topography,” says G Ateliers Architecture’s Orlando Garcia of the mountainous terrain dotted by informal brick construction, “so we wanted to do a simple yet powerful building.” Referring to the constraints of time, budget, and the local workforce’s ability, Garcia notes, “We worked with the reality of our