It’s not always easy to be an architect in modern Italy, where contemporary design must measure itself against the weight of historic patrimony.

At 985 feet long, an abandoned Panasonic television factory in Beijing offered tantalizing potential as a cultural space—and huge challenges.

A graffiti-covered factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, may not seem the most likely of venues for classical music.

"Everything I do is aimed at dynamizing my work,” Carme Pinós declares, “because dynamism communicates lightness.”

Dramatically framed by Morphosis’s glassy Federal Building looming behind it, the revived Strand theater, a gleaming red experimental performance space and education center for the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, clicks into its site on San Francisco’s Market Street like one of the final pieces of a complex puzzle.

Art breaks the rules” is an idea Pomona College’s art faculty hoped its new building would convey, recalls department chair Michael O’Malley.

In developing the ceramic facade for a revamped studio-art wing for Macalester College’s Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center, the architects at Minneapolis-based firm HGA started to feel as if they had enrolled in an art class of their own.