Blunt, thickset, elemental––these are your first impressions, having turned through the close neighborhood streets of Firminy and come upon the Eglise Saint-Pierre Firminy-Vert in the widening expanse of its suburban setting.

How do you turn a Renaissance Revival banking hall from 1917 into a 21st-century visual-arts library and do it on a tight budget?

The gray skies of Seattle settle on the moody, chalk-like paintings of renowned artist Catherine Eaton Skinner in her second-floor studio overlooking the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Rand Elliott, FAIA, drives his white Porsche 911 around Oklahoma City, showing you his major projects, shifting gears, and sweeping through the sprawling landscape so quickly, authoritatively, you begin to understand how important the new Chesapeake Boathouse is to the career of this consummate Oklahoma architect.

Richärd + Bauer, a young Phoenix-based firm, has demonstrated numerous times in its 11-year history that it can still advance architectural quality in inexpensive institutional buildings.

The Casa das Mudas Centro das Artes, on the Portuguese Island of Madeira, crowns a basalt promontory 600 feet above the Atlantic, but from its entry atop the precipice, the building disappears.

In Singapore, where seemingly innocuous gum chewing is prosecutable, a nightclub with an explicit drug theme seems impossible.

At the Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building at the University of Toronto, Foster + Partners has turned contextual design on its head.

Until recently, Houston’s meandering Buffalo Bayou river had been a camera-ready place—if you were using a long-range lens.