Civic Architecture

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Diplomatic Position: In the midst of the visual hubbub of China's third-largest city, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill creates an understated ensemble of buildings for the U.S. Consulate General. The U.S. Consulate General in Guangzhou, China, makes only the quietest of claims within the city's noisy new business district. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), its seven low-rise buildings—offices, screening facilities, a warehouse, and a residence for Marines—dot a 7.4-acre site in the burgeoning Pearl River New Town. Zaha Hadid's opera house lies catercorner to it, and Wilkinson Eyre's supertall IFC Guangzhou and KPF's soon-to-be-supertaller CTF Guangzhou are close by.

Like a man stumbling out of his cryogenic pod, a project revived after cooling on ice for decades enters a world that is oddly familiar, but largely unknown. 

A library by David Adjaye fits into a D.C. park with serenity and dynamism.

One of the fastest-growing places in North America, Vaughan, 14 miles north of Toronto, has morphed from a rural township of 16,000 people in 1960 to a sprawling suburb of 288,000 today.

As the key location for skiing events at the 2010 Winter Olympics, Whistler, British Columbia, will no doubt be irrevocably imprinted on people’s minds this winter.

In 1999, Koning Eizenberg Architecture and Spurlock Poirier Landscape Architects were commissioned to design the Virginia Avenue Park expansion.

The Seattle Streetcar was created in an effort to transform Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood into a vibrant urban community.

The Sava Pool, designed for both recreational and competitive functions, is situated at the southern end of a public park between a vehicular thoroughfare and a residential neighborhood.