Architect: Spain's Santiago Calatrava
Cost: $75 million
Famous for his train stations, Calatrava gave Milwaukee's 115-year-old art museum a Jetsonesque addition with a massive sun shade weighing 100 tons. The shade opens and closes to regulate light and temperature inside the city's instant tourist attraction.
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles
Architect: Frank Gehry
Cost: $274 million
In 1987 Disney's widow, Lillian, gave $50 million toward building L.A.'s concert hall, a stainless-steel-skinned beauty with curves made possible by software first developed for Boeing. Opened in October—six years after Lillian's death—the 2,265-seat auditorium has floral carpeting. "She loved flowers," the architect told The New York Times. "It's sad she'll never see it."
McCormick Tribune Campus Center, Chicago
Architect: Holland's Rem Koolhaas
Cost: $48.2 million
Ah, the yin and yang of it. In the background a gray, rectilinear mass of buildings by 20th-century master builder Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the Illinois Institute of Technology; up front, current architectural It Boy Koolhaas's new student center, with splashes of orange and a 530-ft. tube through which Chicago's elevated trains pass. This is Koolhaas's first major U.S. building and it was worth the wait, say his fans.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
