Kensington High School for the Creative and Performing Arts; Philadelphia SMP Architects (in collaboration with SRK Architects) The design team was challenged to create a small high school that would help students from low-income families succeed. They focused on keeping the floor plan inviting and transparent, to give students views of green roofs and artwork and chose a site near public transportation so it would be easily accessible. Since the building was completed in 2010, student truancy dropped from 35 percent to 0 percent, test scores quadrupled, and the graduation rate increased from 29 percent to 69 percent.

This titanium and glass dome-shaped National Centre for the Performing Arts Opera House was a point of contention when it debuted in late 2007 because many people felt its egg-like structure, designed by French architect Paul Andreu, disrupted the feng shui of the capital. Check their schedule to catch touring orchestras, ballet troupes, and of course, Peking opera.

The sprawling industrial zone-turned-art district Caochangdi is home to contemporary galleries, studios, and artists, including the iconic Ai Weiwei. After an afternoon at the exceedingly commercial 798 Art Zone, the Caochangdi experience is comparatively laid-back.

Maple performs in the basement playroom. The basement windows are coated with a polycarbonate greenhouse glaze.

One of Arquitectonica's civic projects is the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Photo by Norman McGrath.

Arts & Archtitecture magazine cover by John Follis and James Reed, September 1953. Collection of Los Angeles Modern Auctions, reprinted courtesy of David Travers Associates/LACMA.

The former post office in Beverly Hills gained new life as the centerpiece of a performing arts complex, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

These two Large Visual Arts Studios are the first structures realized as part of an overall conceptual master plan for the property–slated to include additional studios, a music/recording studio, workshop, residence hall and performing arts venue.

A collaboration between YUN Architecture and interior designer Penelope August, a renovated, 19th-century townhouse with landmark status used to be an egg and poultry distributor. Now virtually unrecognizable, the parlor floor is the home's open-plan living area. A formerly defunct fireplace was reactivated and clad with a custom-made, limestone mantle.

Yun designed this curved handrail. To the side, a carved niche is meant to showcase art.

Museum of Arts & Design, New York

Palace of Fine Arts, Liz Hickok, 2006

Paul J. Smith, Director Emeritus, Museum of Arts and Design, with his wood turnings and sculpture, 1958. Photos courtesy Paul J. Smith. Read the interview.

Yunity Park - Garden

Yunity Park - Cafeteria

Yunity Park - Exterior Bridge

Yunity Park - Exterior Landscape

Yunity Park - Nighttime Exterior

Yunity Park - Exterior Dome

YUN Architecture carefully restored the exterior of the house with new windows, dormers, and wood frames.

Yunity Park - Reception Seating Area

All of the doors in the hallway were salvaged and found by the owners. Yun designed and inserted the glass transom windows above the doors.

Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Minneapolis, Minnesota (2006)

An exhibition at Arts Chiyoda in Tokyo. Photo by Naoki Ishizaka

Section Drawing of Portland Museum of Art by Mu-Yun Chang

The soon-to-be-completed Performing Arts Center designed by Cesar Pelli in downtown Miami provides a fitting end to Leff’s tour and a perfect beginning for a re-energized business district.

"In terms of the interior, there are preferences for where the headboard needs to be and then how that relationship works to the door of the bedroom, so those were things that the clients guided us on," says Shen.

Novosibirsk Summer Pavilion (arts and culture venue) by

A cabernet Franc with venison and an issue of the Scottish arts tabloid the Skinny.

The designers fortunately happened on enough antique wallpaper to outfit the whole room. The bookshelf is a custom design by Yun and made of salvaged heart pine, same as the floor. It features grooves in the sides, so the shelves can be pulled in and out.

You've Got Mail by Clare Hsu, a student at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California. On display at the California College of the Arts's Wattis Institute galleries April 16-24, 2010, as part of the The Way Beyond Art: Sunny Memories exhibition. Photo by Tonatiuh Ambrosetti & Daniela Droz.

Homeowner Jay Longtin served as the general contractor and performed the majority of the remodel work, aside from the outdoor floors, concrete, and pool, which were done by Architectural Blue.

Arts Building and Cloister, George Nakashima, 1967, New Hope, Pennsylvania. The George Nakashima House and Studio is a collection of 21 highly experimental buildings created by this Japanese-American woodworker and designer in the 1960s following deep consideration for its forested surroundings in the Pennsylvania countryside. Nakashima used novel engineering techniques and materials to create a unique aesthetic that blends Japanese craft traditions with a midcentury modernist sensibility. Two of the earliest buildings erected on this National Historic Landmark site, the Arts Building and Cloister, best exemplify Nakashima’s design ideals with a soaring hyperbolic paraboloid plywood roof and an open interior with extensive wood surfaces and expansive glass walls. A Getty grant will support the development of a Conservation Management Plan that will incorporate an in-house training program for the conservation and maintenance of the campus, drawing on the expertise of the University of Pennsylvania’s Historic Preservation program. Grant support: $100,000

The Performing Arts building at Cadence Park. Photo by Tsutsumida Pictures

Jewett Arts Center, Paul Rudolph, 1958, Wellesley, Massachusetts. In 1958 architect Paul Rudolph completed his breakthrough building, the Jewett Arts Center at Wellesley College. That same year he assumed the chairmanship of the Department of Architecture at Yale, where he became a key figure in fostering the modernist aesthetic he had embraced as a student of Walter Gropius. Designed to house the Departments of Art and Music as well as galleries for the college’s sculpture and painting collections, the Jewett Arts Center is a masterful assimilation of modernist materials and structural framing into a surrounding collegiate Gothic setting. Clustered concrete aggregate columns, pointed aluminum skylights, and expansive bay windows repeat the motifs of nearby buildings using an updated, modernist idiom. A Getty grant will support a conservation management plan that prioritizes the retention of the building’s historic fabric in future planning, makes better use of existing spaces, and develops a treatment protocol for significant building components. Grant support: $120,000