Although Rome is no longer the head of an empire, plenty of roads still lead to it. Many of its streets are now getting swept up in a radical redesign of the city’s urban fabric. As cars and scooters are slowly exorcised from the city’s center, tire-friendly asphalt is replacing the historic sanpietrini, or cobblestones, on major traffic arteries. The old sanpietrini will be used to resurface streets and piazzas that will be handed over to pedestrians at the project’s end. One of Rome's new pedestrian-only zones. Mayor Walter Veltroni outlined the “restyling” plan at a press event earlier this

The Architectural Resources Group (ARG) and Tom Eliot Fisch have resurrected a nearly lost piece of history by preserving the handwriting on the wall—literally—at the former Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco. Known as the West Coast version of Ellis Island, it was the entry point for close to 200,000 predominantly Chinese immigrants at the turn of the last century. Angel Island’s compound consists of barracks, a hospital, and a powerhouse. These structures are less well preserved than their eastern counterparts. Demolition was planned for the early 1970s, until hand-etched poetry was discovered on the dormitory walls. A listing

In the months following Hurricane Katrina, two well-connected musicians, Harry Connick, Jr., and Branford Marsalis, began thinking about how they could help New Orleans’s music scene recover. They soon teamed with Habitat for Humanity to envision Musicians’ Village: a neighborhood composed of 70 single-family homes, five duplexes, a park, and a performance center, that would provide musicians with affordable housing and work space. The move from cultural mission to concrete buildings has not been as simple—or as musical—as they initially hoped it would be, but it is finally showing success. Photo courtesy Bell Architects The Ellis Marsalis Center for Music