In Japan, where few buildings are made to last, trees are mostly dispensable, and real estate remains among the world’s priciest, most architects simply nod politely to the notion of context.

When architect Zhang Ke set up Standardarchitecture in Beijing, he chose the name because “it sounds neutral. It doesn’t imply any specific form,” he says.

There are some people who fashion their lives in response to happy accidents. Neither Roberto de Leon, Jr., AIA, nor M. Ross Primmer, AIA, is one of those people.

The Swiss have long held a reputation for creating products of impeccable precision. Tilo Herlach, Simon Hartmann, and Simon Frommenwiler, partners in the Basel-based HHF Architects, have found early international success by turning that stereotype on its head.

Working first together and now separately, Iván Juárez and Patricia Meneses bring two distinct sensibilities to their architecture.

With the name of their design firm — L.E.FT — Makram el Kadi and Ziad Jamaleddine tip us off to their ideology and offer a partial clue pointing to the location of their first New York City office, on the Lower East Side.

Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen are not paper architects in the traditional sense. Partners in life as well as business, the two founders and design principals of the Vancouver-based firm Molo share an enduring fascination with making things.

Having designed a pavilion for a three-day event and a memorial required to stand for at least 200 years, Kevin Carmody and Andrew Groarke have wrestled with that most slippery of human constraints: time.

Tony Chenchow and Stephanie Little belong to a crowded field of husband-and-wife architectural practices in Australia.