“The way we work together is like a ping-pong game,” says Sojung Lee, 36, about her partnership with Sangjoon Kwak, 35, in the Seoul-based OBBA (Office for Beyond Boundaries Architecture).

“The acrobatic novelty of much of today’s architecture doesn’t interest us,” says Alejandro Guerrero. He and Andrea Soto describe themselves as traditionalists, with one caveat: their tradition is modernism.

The 38-year-old Dutchman Anne Holtrop talks about his work with an artist’s sensibility, extracting form from existing, or completely random, conditions.

As with culinary innovations like Korean beef tacos or the Cronut, architecture often benefits from cross-cultural influences.

In 2005, architects Jianxiang He and Ying Jiang were working on the Guangzhou Baiyun International Convention Center, a project by the Chinese-government-run CITIC ADI and its design partner, Belgian firm BURO II.

Globe-trotting and media savvy, up in the Cloud and down-to-earth, Ramiro Losada and Alberto García represent a new breed of Spanish architect.

A short walk down a ramshackle alley typical of Beijing’s hutong neighborhoods leads to a pivoting steel door deeply recessed between a pair of gray-brick buildings.

There is no aesthetic signature to the diverse buildings produced by Studio Farris since its formation in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2008.

Shuttling through time zones is second nature for Yichen Lu, the 39-year-old founder and principal of Studio Link-Arc. Lu—a Shanghai native who doubles as an associate professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing—spent this year bouncing between New York and China, with frequent stops in Italy to supervise the construction of the Milan Expo’s China Pavilion