Two teams of architects employ very different strategies to reinvigorate a pair of ambitious 1960s apartment projects, one in the north of England and the other in Paris. The enthusiasm with which Britain and France took to the construction of Mid-Century Modern social housing is equaled only by their present appetite for its demolition. In 2003, the French government announced a 10-year urban-renewal plan in which 200,000 dwellings would be replaced; in Britain, Alison and Peter Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens, completed in London in 1972, is one of many projects that once enjoyed international prestige and are now facing the

The tumult of Kiev's postwar history is evident in its architecture: The bombast of Stalin's elephantine classicism was abruptly superseded by swaths of grimly utilitarian housing after Khrushchev's turn against “unnecessary excess.” 

Mass Tourism has a paradoxical effect: The infrastructure for access and interpretation it demands can obscure the very thing visitors come to see.

Thomas Heatherwick’s unconventional approach flouts design orthodoxy. A visit to Thomas Heatherwick’s London studio is like stepping into a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities—one of those idiosyncratic efforts to capture the wondrous variety of the natural and man-made worlds. Strange objects crowd the shelves and floor, indeterminate forms that might be product prototypes, scale models, or sculpture, hinting at the fertile imagination of a designer who transcends any narrow job description. For a New York City Longchamp store, Heatherwick created a series of curving, thermoplastic balustrades.  Heatherwick set up his studio in 1994 fresh out of college, and he employs 80