After ISIS militants seized control of Palmyra—the ancient Syrian city called the “Venice of the Sands”— last May, they immediately set out to destroy it.

“It is much better to be good than to be original,” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously advised his protégé Philip Johnson.

This year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize winner, the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, is known for his socially-minded design. Since establishing his Santiago firm ELEMENTAL in 2001, Aravena has designed some 2,500 units of housing.

In 2012, Dutch firm Oving Architekten won a competition to create a protective enclosure for this deteriorating monument to infamy, but wanted their contribution to dissolve into the background.

Introducing the winner of this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, Escobedo Soliz Studio.

The old football field may be long gone, but Mrs. Clark Thompson’s temperance-era rite was oddly prophetic. More than a century later, on the footprint of its grandstands, Ohio Field has been reincarnated as a new chilled-water facility.