Sam Lubell

Despite their amazing advances, most hospitals today still fail to make patients feel relaxed, or at times even human.

After New York City’s Twin Towers fell in September 2001, rebuilding quickly—and majestically—seemed imperative. But seven years later, there is nothing majestic about the 16-acre World Trade Center site, a construction zone informally called The Pit.

Santiago Calatrava’s design for a transit hub at the World Trade Center site in Manhattan has been scaled back. On July 1, shortly after revealing that virtually all of the construction projects at Ground Zero were behind schedule and over budget, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced it was cutting out a signature element of Calatrava’s elliptical-shaped building: a hydraulic system that would allow its ribbed steel wings to open and close.

The world’s tallest building, the 162-story, 2,680 foot Burj Dubai, designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM), is set to open next year. But Dubai also has six other skyscrapers of at least 100 stories in the works, making it the super-tall building capital of the world—head and shoulders above other cities.

In the fight against McMansions, Venice, California, firm Touraine Richmond Architects’ One Window House serves as a demonstration project.

On May 27, less than two months after winning the 2008 Pritzker Prize, French architect Jean Nouvel defeated top firms such as Foster + Partners and Studio Daniel Libeskind in a competition to design a new iconic tower for La Défense, an aging business district on the outskirts of Paris. 

How do you triple the size of a house when it sits on a small lot in Venice, California?