NEW YORK CITY
New Museum

Despite a decade and a half of rapid gentrification in which former tenements became million-dollar condos and every spare square foot of Manhattan was snatched up by slavering real estate investors, the Bowery—a neighborhood that takes its name from the mile-long avenue running through Lower Manhattan—remained stubbornly seedy, home to the city's last flophouses and SROs (single-room occupancies). Now, though, the Bowery has a shiny icon, the New Museum, designed by the Japanese duo of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, together known as SANAA. Formerly located in SoHo, where it was squeezed between commercial storefronts, the New Museum is dedicated to contemporary (and often cutting-edge) art from around the world, which the architects alluded to in their avant-garde design. "The Bowery was very gritty," the architects wrote, "and the New Museum is a combination of elegant and urban. We were determined to make a building that felt like that." The result is a structure that, instead of trying (and failing) to integrate itself into the neighborhood's low-slung rooftops, redefines downtown architecture for a new generation. The exterior, a mesh of expanded aluminum, gleams in the sun and glows at night, and the building's seven-tiered, off-kilter structure plays with the very conventions of what a building can be (212-219-1222; newmuseum.org).

WASHINGTON, D.C.
Kogod Courtyard
Smithsonian Institution

When your commission is to work on what Walt Whitman called "the noblest of Washington buildings," it's best to have a gentle touch. In capping off the courtyard of the Old Patent Office Building, a nineteenth-century Greek Revival edifice known as the Reynolds Center that's home to the American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, British architect Sir Norman Foster was careful to tread lightly. "Given the importance of the Old Patent Office, the design was wholly driven by a deep respect for the existing building," Foster has said. "It was decided that it should not touch the building at any point but instead float above it like a cloud over the courtyard." The ceiling, whose curves help support its weight, is connected to the facade by a few inches of sealant, while thin aluminum-clad columns both support the structure and channel rainwater to the garden below. Sunlight passes through the lattice of the canopy, casting a grid of shadows on the granite floor and the shallow fountain that runs across it. At night, when the space is often used for events, the roof becomes a delicate shelter against the dark and distant sky (8th and F Sts. N.W.; 202-633-1000; reynoldscenter.org).

QINHUANGDAO, CHINA
Red Ribbon
Tanghe River Park