Shanghai Tower, Shanghai, by Gensler | Measuring over 2,000 feet tall, Shanghai Tower is now the second-tallest building in the world. Its spiraling form, which is covered with a double glass curtain wall, is designed to withstand typhoon-level winds. It contains several public sky gardens stacked within several vertical “neighborhoods.”

Harbin Opera House, Harbin, China, by MAD | MAD Architects, one of the world’s top emerging firms, made its most significant mark so far with the Harbin Opera House. The building’s sinuous structure, which is covered with white aluminum panels, evokes the area’s stunning, hilly landscape. Inside, sculpted blond wood walls wrap around two theaters and various open spaces. The merging of natural craft and contemporary form seems to be an, ahem, harbinger of the future.

National Sawdust | Williamsburg, Brooklyn | Bureau V: From outside, this music hall for emerging New York artists looks like a typical red brick warehouse conversion in Williamsburg (although the wacky and colorful mural by Assume Vivid Astro Focus is a hint that this is not a normal space). Inside, the building’s shattered, crystalline geometries, shiny surfaces, and white glowing auditorium are a mesmerizing shock---in a good way.

Grace Farms, New Canaan, CT, by SANAA | Covered walkways connect a series of glass pavilions that house a library, gym, and an amphitheater for worship. Seen from above, the shiny, aluminum-roofed building—is it a tadpole, a creek, a trail of Mercury?—takes your breath away.

Learning Hub, Singapore, by Heatherwick Studio | Designer Thomas Heatherwick started by designing furniture. He has since increased the scale of his projects, working on bridges and recreation piers---not to mention Google’s new campus. His grandest project yet? A university building in Singapore made up of 12 tapered, etched, and rounded towers (they look like ancient carrots) that combine learning and social space. The towers come together to create a cavernous, amorphous atrium surrounded by “pods” for learning.

Messner Mountain Museum, South Tyrol, Italy, by Zaha Hadid This museum is dedicated to mountaineering, so it’s fitting that it be embedded in the summit of Mount Kronplatz, in Italy’s South Tyrol region. Concrete canopies, cast on site, jut from the rock, providing visitors panoramic views. The interior space zig-zags in trademark Hadid fashion, and is clad in a grid of matte concrete panels. The aesthetic is very Bond Villain-esque (a good thing, of course).

Garage Museum, Moscow, by OMA | This renovation of a long-derelict concrete pavilion in Moscow’s Gorky Park includes exhibition galleries, a creative center, and a roof terrace, among other spaces. Visitors enter the building, which is fronted by a shimmering skin of polycarbonate panels, through a raised cargo door. Wonderfully, it preserves original Soviet-era elements, including a mosaic wall, green tiles, and cool brick. The building keeps its wires and ducts visible through a translucent inner membrane---a very Rem Koolhaas touch.

Pomona College Studio Art Hall, Pomona, CA, by wHY | The complex combines glass box studios, collaborative spaces, and cultural facilities around an open plaza, under an undulating wood and steel truss canopy. Why doesn’t every California learning space take advantage of the outdoors like this?

THREAD Artists’ Residence, Sinthian, Senegal, by Toshiko Mori | Located in remote Senegal, this exceptional community space crosses parametric design and an undulating profile with local materials like bamboo frames, compressed dirt blocks, and a thatch roof. It’s the rare contemporary building that feels like part of the earth, and it’s quite at home in a rural village.

The Broad, Los Angeles, by Diller Scofidio and Renfro | Tied with the Whitney as the most anticipated new cultural building in the United States this year, the Broad doesn’t disappoint. Its white honeycomb façade, which tapers up along its edges to welcome visitors, belies a dramatic progression of spaces that eventually leads you up a long tube to a glowing, column-free main gallery space, flooded with light through a grid of enormous scooped skylights. Tickets are free, but be sure to reserve them in advance.

Centro, Mexico City, by TEN Arquitectos | For Centro, a Mexico City university dedicated to creative studies, TEN Arquitectos designed a campus of jutting and cantilevered white steel and glass buildings perched over a giant central green.

The Iceberg, Aarhus, Denmark, by JDS Architects | The Iceberg---a housing project in Denmark’s second-largest city---gets its name from its white, jagged exterior. But the varied shapes and sizes actually have a practical use: they help residents of this dense development get enough light and views.

Bosco Verticale, Milan, by Stefano Boeri | Can we live in dense cities and still enjoy nature? Italian architect Stefano Boeri believes we can. The architect’s Bosco Verticale (which translates to “Vertical Forest”), comprises two residential towers whose extra large balconies literally overflow with 900 trees and more than 2,000 plants.

One Santa Fe, Los Angeles, by Michael Maltzan Architecture | The project in LA’s red hot Arts District has been criticized by many for its massive scale—it looms over SCI-Arc and the rest of its neighbors like a cruise ship docked in a fishing village. But Maltzan has nonetheless infused it with a sense of raw edginess and angular syncopation---not to mention an elaborate grouping of bridges, plazas, street-level retail, and patios that merges architecture with planning in a fascinating way.

Arnhem Central Station, Arnhem, The Netherlands, by UN Studio | Once upon a time air travel represented the future. Today it’s trains… again. Arnhem Central Station in the Netherlands, a sinuous concrete and glass structure that weaves its way above and below ground, and in and around its neighborhood, is a TWA Terminal for the modern era.

Whitney Museum, New York City, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop | It’s no easy task to replace one of the most legendary buildings in New York, but Renzo Piano seems to have pulled it off with his new Whitney Museum, which sits adjacent to the High Line in the city’s Meatpacking District. The museum’s rough materials and heavy massing are, at first glance, surprising; they’re not pretty, but they effectively evoke the area’s industrial past. The building’s dynamic (albeit crowded) spaces, oversized external balconies, and legendary art collection explain the ridiculous lines to get in.

Szczecin Philharmonic, Szczecin, Poland, by Estudio Barozzi Veiga | This translucent, glass-clad building resembles a glowing neighborhood. Its jagged roofline is influenced by the area’s tall residences and sharply pitched. Inside, the sculpted, diamond-patterned spaces are equally spectacular.

Burntwood School, Wandsworth, UK, by AHMM | Winner of this year’s RIBA Stirling Prize for best UK Building, this project wrapped angled, precast concrete panels around the outmoded buildings at Burntwood School (a girls' secondary school located southwest of London), and used the same cladding for six new structures on campus. The stunning, sculptural results are a model for how to heal the past, rather than tear it down.

Sunpath House, Miami Beach, by Christian Wassmann | The torqued central wall of this exposed concrete addition in Miami Beach follows the curving path of the sun on the longest day of the year. Most of the three-story project cantilevers off of it. The house---which contains an open, ground-floor dining space, a glass and vine-enclosed living space, and a sun deck---is designed to emphasize what’s around you, not all the shiny things you can put inside it.