Outside, the couple clad the house with a rain screen of 1.5-by-1.5-inch strips of spruce to create a “modern rustic barn.” The extra-deep sills of the first-floor window become a bench on the outside and a shelf on the inside.

On Sunday, February 15, The Broad (pronounced: brode) museum’s top-floor, column-free gallery space welcomed Los Angeles artists, civic figures, and art enthusiasts for a one-day preview. Still absent from the space were its partition walls, which will display the personal collections of contemporary art of philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad when the museum opens in September 2015. For the day-into-night preview, The Broad presented Sky-lit: Volume, Light, and Sound, featuring the works of artists BJ Nilsen and Yann Novak. The artistic vision of the museum’s architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, also struck a chord with visitors.

Alexandra Young's Craftsman-style bungalow in Oakland testifies to the wisdom of patiently accumulating a collection over many years. An ornate masonry fireplace fits easily into the home's historical mood, but like other rooms in the house, it has been updated with a modern fire screen.

Walter Hood is perfectly comfortable carving out serene spaces amid often chaotic urban Oakland, California. Despite the speeding cars overhead, Splash Pad Park is now home to a thriving farmer’s market.

A large personal library, featuring patterned rugs, adds to the home's charm.

Part of the Tassafaronga Village affordable-housing complex in Oakland, California, this 60-unit apartment building anchors the new neighborhood and surpasses California’s already-strict energy standards by 47.5 percent.

Photo via Bay Area Bites.

Photo via Bay Area Bites.

Wright’s last major work—and one of his most iconic—sadly didn’t open until six months after the architect’s death. Nevertheless, the Guggenheim Museum is one of the most important pieces of American architecture and is considered to be Wright’s most important contribution.

The Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin, designed by Russian firm SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov, has a wooden door that mimics the structure's textured concrete exterior.

A bicycles tethered to a rack are among the artifacts on display. Photo by Jin Lee.

This Ladder Co. 3 truck carried 11 firefighters from a fire house in the East Village to the Trade Center on 9/11. All of them perished in the North Tower. Photo by Jin Lee.

About 14,000 unidentified human remains are held in this repository in the museum's Memorial Hall. Photo by Jin Lee.

Column No. 1,001B, the last section of World Trade Center steel to be removed from Ground Zero, stands 37 feet tall next to the slurry wall inside the National September 11 Memorial Museum, designed by Davis Brody Bond. The museum opened in May.

A dramatic departure from the Whitney Museum's previous home, a Marcel Breuer building on the Upper East Side, Renzo Piano's recently completed structure in the Meatpacking District opens itself completely to its surroundings.

@takanori8452 captured this lovely image of the Pei-designed Miho Museum.

The pavilion is outfitted with materials, including ash slats on the ceiling, that Craig Dykers, founding partner at Snøhetta, says were chosen to "provide a sense of comfort as this is a site filled with a great deal of anxiety." At left are a pair of "trident" columns that survived the collapse of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Photo courtesy of Snøhetta.

Artifacts, including a grapple claw and a sign from the World Trade Center PATH station, on display at the National September 11 Memorial Museum. Photo by Jin Lee.

Visitors will pass this photograph of the World Trade Center, taken at 8:30 a.m. on September 11, 2001, as they begin to follow the "ribbon" from the concourse level down to the exhibits at bedrock level. Photo by Jin Lee.

A section of "impact steel" from the World Trade Center is on display outside the footprint of the South Tower inside the National September 11 Memorial Museum.

Airplaine wreckage on display in the historical exhibit. Photo by Jin Lee.

One of the box columns from the original Trade Center that the architects were required to preserve and integrate into the museum's design. Photo by Jin Lee.

At street level, the museum pavilion sits between the memorial pools that occupy the footprints of the original World Trade Center towers, near the new One World Trade Center skyscraper. Photo courtesy of Snøhetta.

A display from the Chelsea Jeans store near the World Trade Center. Photo by Jin Lee.

The Survivors' Stairs inside the National September 11 Memorial Museum.

Visitors will enter the museum through this pavilion off Greenwich Street, designed by Snøhetta. Image courtesy of Snøhetta.

Made of polished integral concrete with a Cor-Ten steel base, a fire pit “becomes very much a unique element that sets itself apart in form and color,” says landscape architect Stefan Thuilot, who designed it.

Oakland's Cathedral of Light, designed by SOM, is just a single-story building, but the gracious curves showcase the artistry possible with taller wooden structures. Reaching a height of 136 feet, the wood-and-glass sanctuary exudes a calming presence.

A zigzagging white-gravel path ultimately ends at the final destination: a circular fire pit for conversation.

In addition to her beloved midcentury style, Young developed an appreciation for Scandinavian design while abroad in Europe in her twenties, evident in the pared-down bedroom.

A shot of the Oakland sample warehouse.

Photo by: Meatpaper

Jaime: Tree Museum in Switzerland Open since 2010 on the grounds of the Enea Garden Design headquarters in Switzerland, the Tree Museum is a unique and rather poetic concept: a collection of 50 specimen trees, many older than 100 years old, in an open-air museum-like setting designed by architect Chad Oppenheim. Blocks of sandstone set off the sculptural tress, and give the whole place a Zen-like atmosphere. Would love to see it in person some day!

The building’s specific orientation on the site, neither parallel nor orthogonal to the street, allows galleries to receive a maximum amount of natural light.

Skylights allow for the natural variability of light to occur and reproduce the lighting embraced by Long Island artists, showing the versatility of each piece of art depending on weather conditions.