The CKK Jordanki concert hall emerges like an outcrop of weathered rock from an urban park in Toruń, in northern Poland. Its Spanish architect, Fernando Menis, has yoked such imagery to local architectural references and technical ingenuity to establish a strong character for the building while deferring to its sensitive setting on the edge of the medieval Old Town.
From the bridge connecting bustling downtown Harbin to bucolic Sun Island, the new Harbin Opera House comes into view, with its impressive sloping forms that suggest the snow-capped mountains found in this northern Chinese region.
Dramatically framed by Morphosis’s glassy Federal Building looming behind it, the revived Strand theater, a gleaming red experimental performance space and education center for the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, clicks into its site on San Francisco’s Market Street like one of the final pieces of a complex puzzle.