Municipalities are the new Medicis, erecting trophy buildings to entice the itinerant masses. Paul Goldberger reflects on this year's bumper crop

Spain
TENERIFE AUDITORIUM, SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE
Santiago Calatrava's latest creation isn't easy to pin down. Is the roof of his concert hall a cone—or the dorsal hump of a descending whale? Is the soaring canopy a billowing sail? A bending blade of grass? A cresting wave? The only certainty is how camera-ready it is. The first in a series of projects intended to lure high-minded holidaymakers to the largest of the Canary Islands, the curving-concrete, 1,660-seat performance space will, island fathers hope, bring in the same crowds that flock to Frank Gehry's museum on the mainland (www.auditoriodetenerife.com; in Spanish).

Austria
KUNSTHAUS, GRAZ
British architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier entitled their effort Spacelab. But denizens of Austria's second city have another name for the blue-skinned blob that houses the Kunsthaus contemporary art museum: the Friendly Alien. Whatever the origins of its otherness, it resembles nothing so much as a bodily organ that's outgrown its host. The sixteen tubercles, or "light nozzles," illuminate the galleries within, and breaks in the outer membrane permit glimpses of the surrounding historic city (www.kunsthausgraz.at).

Japan
PRADA, TOKYO
The appeal of Prada's latest store, in Tokyo's Aoyama district, goes beyond those looking to augment their wardrobe. A six-story tower by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, it has a tilted-grid facade surrounded by a paved courtyard and a mossy wall. Interiors are white-on-white, right down to the carpeting—the better to showcase Prada's trademark noir palette. But the real show starts after dark, when the windows—some concave, others convex; some clear, others translucent—are illuminated from within, and a series of projections make the building come magically, rhythmically to life (5-2-6 Minami Aoyama; 81-3-6418-0400).

Italy
JUBILEE CHURCH, ROME
Tor Tre Teste is a working-class suburb east of the Eternal City. But its Jubilee Church—designed by Richard Meier and consecrated in October to commemorate Pope John Paul II's twenty-fifth anniversary as pontiff—promises to bring a new kind of pilgrim to town. Three concrete shells—an architectural allusion to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—make up the nave and give the building its distinctive profile. Soaring skylights and glass exterior walls connect the curves, bathing the church, the chapel, and the baptismal font in truly heavenly light (Via Francesco Tovaglieri).

England
SELFRIDGES, BIRMINGHAM
Birmingham has long been dismissed as London's shabby, industrial inferior. But with the arrival of the latest Selfridges store, a bubblelike behemoth from the architectural firm Future Systems, Brum (as the locals lovingly call it) is garnering attention as never before. Blanketed in fifteen thousand aluminum disks, the sexy beast stands in glittering counterpoint to its Victorian-era neighbors. And unlike at that metal-clad building in Bilbao, there are no worries of hard-to-clean dirt deposits. What becomes a legend most, it turns out, is an annual hose down (www.selfridges.co.uk; 44-8708-377-377).