On the outskirts of the fast-growing Chinese city of Qinhuangdao, about 180 miles east of Beijing, development threatened to turn the riverbanks into a paved-over urban space. The Beijing-based architectural firm Turenscape instead conceived Tanghe River Park, a garden cum ecological oasis. Through it, for a third of a mile, runs the Red Ribbon, a steel bench snaking its way amid the undergrowth. The design orients the visitor, gives a frame of reference for the garden, provides seating, and, after dark, sheds light from the fixtures embedded in the structure. Thanks to its illumination, there are no lampposts in the park; the only other structures are small boxlike pavilions found along the ribbon's length.

TORONTO
Michael Lee-Chin Crystal
Royal Ontario Museum

When American architect Daniel Libeskind's radical new entryway and exhibit space at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum opened last year, it received mixed reviews from the locals-and that's putting it mildly. One columnist called it a "jagged, angry outburst"; another suggested that the best way to experience the addition was under the influence of mood-altering psychogenic substances. But others say the aggressively decontructionist addition is just the shock of the new that this slow-to-change city needs. The genesis of the design—a cocktail napkin sketch Libeskind doodled while at the museum during a family wedding—was humble enough. Museum leaders, searching for a big new defining look to attach to the Neo-Romanesque facade of the existing 1914 building, were so enamored of the sharply angled, jewellike shape that they called the structure The Crystal. Museum-goers, too, have been captivated: Some have scaled the inside of windows angling over the street and have left footprints on the exterior walls. Which is just as Libeskind would have it. "I love to see the wonder in the little children's eyes," he has said, "[and] the way the actual physical objects are displayed in a space where imagination can breathe" (100 Queen's Park; 416-586-8000; rom.on.ca).