Sitting in Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' (MVVA) Jacob K. Javits Federal Building Plaza in downtown Manhattan, at Worth and Lafayette streets, you could forget that a former iteration of the quiet plaza sparked one of the most outsized controversies about public sculpture and artists' control over the fate of their work.

Cow no. 1026 approaches a yellow-bristled electric back scratcher at Cornell University's Teaching Dairy Barn in Ithaca, New York.

Sometimes called “the city within a park,” Toronto is known for its ravine system–natural river valleys that create urban oases.

At 413 feet, Zurich's tallest building is emblematic of a neighborhood's delicate balancing act—once an industrial district, it is being transformed into a business and design hub.

It's probably safe to bet that most architects have designed their dream house—on paper, in their heads—many times over. Bob Hale, of Rios Clementi Hale Studios, was lucky enough to make one of his iterations a reality in Los Angeles's Cheviot Hills neighborhood.

While most of its eurozone neighbors were whacked by financial crises, Switzerland managed to avoid a recession, and its economy grew by 1 percent in 2012. 

When architect John Lin and his students from the University of Hong Kong first visited Shijia village in the province of Shaanxi, China, villagers had a list of requests for projects.

Before 2007, people living in the rural Burera district of northern Rwanda had little access to a health-care facility or doctors.

Paris-based architect Jacques Moussafir laughed and then had to count out loud when asked exactly how many floors exist in the 1,650-square-foot house he designed for a bachelor in the city's fashionable Latin Quarter.