Once you get past the eye-popping turquoise green prepatinated copper of Renzo Piano's new 70,000-square-foot addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, you discover that the new wing echoes the older museum in its proportions, sleek lines, and taut planes.

The following excerpts are from a conversation included in Park Avenue Armory, a limited-edition publication edited by Gerhard Mack for the Park Avenue Armory Conservancy.

A single-story, 30,000-square-foot headquarters for the Livestrong Foundation, with office space, meeting rooms, a courtyard, a gym, and a resource center for cancer patients. Located in East Austin, the facility is an adaptive reuse of a concrete tilt-up paper warehouse built in the 1950s.

In an exhibition he organized at the New Museum in New York City last year, Rem Koolhaas took the preservation movement to task, arguing that it had become an “empire” all too successful at tying the hands of architects and suffocating daring thinking.

An architectural tour of Basel and its environs reveals no fewer than 21 completed buildings by the office of natives Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, with a major addition to the city's convention center and a 213-foot office tower for Novartis slated for 2013 and 2015 completion, respectively.

Completed last spring at the northeast corner of Tiananmen Square, the world's biggest museum stands up to the enormity of Beijing's central public space.

A 17-story, 188,600-square-foot hotel with 285 guest rooms and suites, meeting and banquet rooms, a library with a bar, a screening room, a sun room, and a restaurant.

Preservation has returned to the center of architectural theory and practice, after languishing in the margins for over half a century.