Walls and courtyards have defined much of Southern California’s architecture since the Spanish built the first missions in the 18th century.

Renzo Piano calls his new building for the California Academy of Sciences a “soft machine.”

To support the expansive roof, RPBW designed a set of four masonry structures—one at each corner—incorporating two of the original academy’s Neoclassical limestone walls in the northeast structure and using poured concrete for the others.

Given an awkward site squeezed between an 80-foot-high cliff and a busy avenue, Álvaro Siza Vieira’s design for the Iberê Camargo Museum (ICM) secures the building to its particular setting while reaching out both physically and metaphorically to a larger notion of place and culture.

Rather than assume that senior citizens want their housing gussied up in wood shingles and faux Victoriana, the architects of Parkview Terraces in San Francisco treated the project’s residents as people looking to the future rather than the past.