de Young Museum, San Francisco(01 of07)
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\r\nSome architects try metal cladding, but these two nail it. At the four-year-old de Young, they skip traditional glass and steel for 950,000 pounds of perforated copper, which fog hasn’t yet turned green. The brown hue of the chunky nine-story tower, which rises from palms in Golden Gate Park, suggests a Mayan temple. Rooms, too, buck convention, with plenty of non-linear surfaces for Hudson River School landscapes. And ferns brush courtyard windows, which underscores the lush setting.
Photo: © Art on File / Corbis
Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar(02 of07)
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Packed with 1,200 years of sextants, silk carpets, and elaborately detailed pitchers, the Museum of Islamic Art dedicates only 10 percent of its space to galleries. Much else is left open, like a soaring 164-foot central atrium topped with a tiny round skylight that evokes the Cairo mosque on which the stone building was modeled. Alongside Doha’s partly built high-rises in a development-crazed region, the museum’s clean, elemental masses—which evoke an earlier Middle East—can seem quaint.
Photo: Bill Chant
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City(03 of07)
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Before the last bust, New York’s building binge was perhaps unequaled among Western cities. Breaking a tradition of using local talent, the city also signed up architects from overseas to freshen its look, such as this Japanese team, whose metallic 174-foot stack of six off-center boxes has no obvious peer. Inside the New Museum, tiny galleries eschew windows to maximize wall space, allowing for more art. And the brick-and-terracotta neighborhood visible from a seventh-floor terrace emphasizes the building’s fish-out-of-water status.
Photo: Dean Kaufman
China Central Television Headquarters, Beijing(04 of07)
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No two layouts of its 55 floors are the same. Only the Pentagon is a larger office building. Even in a country pushing architectural boundaries, this squared-off doughnut seems dizzyingly unique.
Photo: iStockphoto\r\n\r\n
Taipei 101, Taipei, Taiwan(05 of07)
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For years, Taiwan, like much of eastern Asia, shunned skyscrapers over worries that earthquakes or typhoons might topple them. But new, high-grade mineral-flecked concrete that allows buildings to grow tall without sacrificing strength was put to ample use in this 2004 dart. \r\n
Photo: iStockphoto
30 St. Mary Axe, London(06 of07)
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In recent years, London kept a somewhat low architectural profile, but the buildings it did add—like this glittering office tower, nicknamed “the Gherkin” for its cucumber dimensions—exude panache. Diagonally striped bands of two shades of blue run almost the length of St. Mary’s 41 stories, which taper to a point. The triangular panes, of some 260,000 square feet of glass, form a captivating one-of-a-kind mosaic. And workers can crank them open for breezes, which wins this edifice points for greenness, too.
Photo: iStockphoto
Turning Torso, Malmo, Sweden(07 of07)
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Frank Lloyd Wright used some guesswork to make sure Fallingwater didn’t fall; today, computers do the heavy lifting. They also permit farfetched forms that may have once worked only on paper, such as this 2005 building, which makes a genre-defying 90-degree clockwise rotation as it rises. Like many recent horizon-altering structures, Turning Torso combines a mix of uses, which has been a sure way for development to get funded; in fact, the 656-foot high-rise, which is Scandinavia’s tallest, tucks offices on floors one through 10, and apartments above them, allowing in-house commutes.
Photo: John Liu