Johnsen Schmaling’s project in the woods of northern Wisconsin is a far cry from the typical woodland cottage: the 900-square-foot Linear Cabin, which won a 2016 AIA Small Projects Award, is a sparse yet striking arrangement of three rectilinear boxes separated by two voids and organized under a continuous flat roof.

Situated at the confluence of Hog Pen Creek and Lake Austin, Hog Pen Creek Residence by Lake|Flato was envisioned by its owners as a place that empahsizes the playfulness of summer through exterior living space. Towering oak trees, a steeply sloping site, and aggressive setbacks from the water created a challenging site that the house’s L-shaped footprint and orientation thoughtfully answers.

H3 House, designed by Luciano Kruk, is a minimum tread house on a 210-square-meter corner lot, eight blocks away from the sea. The contemporary house is designed to make the most of the lot’s dimensions and the surroundings.

This 2,800-square-foot house by MW|Works Architecture+Design is located on a 20-acre plot on the southern shore of Puget Sound, with its interiors highlighted by natural wood finishes and glass enclosures around the main living volume.

Sticking out from the one-story bungalows common in its Santa Monica, Calif., neighborhood, the See-Through House from local firm Koning Eizenberg, a modest and simple. Its exterior of white stucco and wood brings to mind a barn, and the interiors have a rough-hewn character.

As part of the Department of Homeland Security’s consolidation project, the Coast Guard’s new headquarters, designed by Perkins+Will and WDG Architecture, slopes down 115 feet to the Potomac River and its green roofs make it disappear when viewed from above.

The exterior of Mario Romano’s Wave House in Venice, Calif., is skinned with aluminum that was digitally manipulated and CNC cut, and then attached to a metal substructure. The lines flow from the top of the parapet, down the roof, to the bottom of the front wall.

Shigeru Ban Architects’ Open House with Condensed Core&#8212part of Tokyo’s “House Vision 2” program&#8212is functional, comfortable, and inexpensive. The center of the experimental house is a cluster of amenities, and living areas are defined by movable windows, layered walls, and materials secured by zippers.

This 1,440-square-foot single-family house and 550-square-foot guesthouse was designed to broaden the owners already strong emotional connection to the living world. Cutler Anderson Architects chose the site near an overgrown artificial pond in an area of the farm that was not conducive to cultivation.

SoNo Arhiteki’s House XL is a large villa formed from two parallel volumes and a third, perpendicular one that connects them.

KODA house is a movable concrete house designed to have a low impact on its environment. The finishing materials Kodasema used are completely nontoxic, and indoor air quality and humidity is maintained at a healthy level.

The Grow Box, by Boston’s Merge Architects, is a rectangular mass in Cambridge with six recessed gardens, all but one of which are on the second floor, which make the homeowner as though like he’s living in a treehouse.

This 2,5000-square-foot house in Kansas City could easily be looked over if you were approaching from the east. That’s because the Shelton Marshall Residence, designed by one of the principals of local firm El Dorado for his family, is a U-shaped form topped by a green roof carefully built into the sloping site.

Luciano Kirk’s house for himself and his girlfriend in Costa Esmeralda, Argentina, is made of exposed concrete, both for its durability in the seaside climate and the harmonious aesthetic it has with the surroundings.

This four-bedroom weekend getaway house on 23 acres at the base of the Blue Ride Mountains was designed by Gensler regional managing principal Jordan Goldstein, AIA, has dramatic views to the mountains in the west from its floor-to-ceiling windows.

The design students of Kent State’s Center for Architecture and Environmental Design will finally all get to attend classes in the same building, a 117,000-square-foot structure by Weiss/Manfredi. Previously, the design disciplines had been spread out into three buildings.

White Walls, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Jean Nouvel, Hon. FAIA, is a 220-foot-tall, white-painted concrete structure in Nicosia, Cyprus. The 107,639-square-foot trapezoidal tower, which includes two floors of retail, six floors of offices, and 10 floors of apartments, cuts a memorable figure on the skyline with pixelated cutouts on the east and west façades that offer glimpses of gardens within.

The Enough House in Upper Kingsburg, Nova Scotia, is a gabled volume clad in Cor-Ten steel, and a perfect example of what the team at MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects calls a “good generic” housing typology with a “rural industrial” aesthetic.

Jutting out of a hillside in Upstate New York, the black steel-and-glass Shokan House designed by Jay Bargmann can be dismantled and reconfigured on another site with its simple yet exquisitely designed components.

The Colorado Building Workshop worked with 28 students to design and build year-round micro-cabins in Leadville, Colo., that would serve as hospitable waypoints for weary hikers 10,000 feet above sea level. The seven structures are wonderfully simple: Each is just a porch, a mudroom, and a bedroom with custom-built plywood furnishings.

Architect, client, and fundraiser Marina Tabassum of Marina Tabssum Architects is the granddaughter of the benefactor who funded the temporary mosque that was previously on the site, and she designed the now-permanent 2016 Aga Khan Award for Architecture–winning building in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

On the Honolulu coast, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson’s Island Residence embraces the area’s lush surroundings and harkens to the client’s Japanese heritage in its attention to detail and affinity for craftsmanship.

The Pivot just barely squeaks by New York City’s legal size constraints for an apartment and manages its small floor plan with a movable wall conceived by Brooklyn-based Architecture Workshop PC and a concealed Murphy bed, both of which combine to reconfigure the 400-square-foot living and livable space.

From the street, the Stealth Building’s 1857 iron façade looks perfectly restored and fitting for New York’s Tribeca South Historic District. But a closer look from above shows WORKac’s innovation, which tacks a modern addition on the top of the five-story building.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Gensler dispatched with the dehumanizing sterility of many hospitals with the design of the Vagelos Education Center at the north end of Columbia’s medical campus. Their strategy was simple: Separate all of the program’s public functions from the clinical spaces, and collect and stack those into what is instead a vertical campus.

AB Design Studio’s ME:OU is a workspace based on a concept of providing an efficient, cost-effective modular space using Intermodal Steel Building Units—more commonly known as shipping containers.

Residential development Xixi Wetland Estate is located within the 2,800-acre Xixi National Wetland Park, which is a few miles west of Hangzhou’s city center. The set of stone-and-concrete boxes carefully arrayed on a plinth in the midst of the wetland hew precisely to the crisp, minimalist aesthetic one would expect of David Chipperfield.

Located in the heart of Shanghai, the nautilus shape of Perkins+Will’s Shanghai Natural History Museum leads visitors up a spiral from the park outside to the building’s extensive green roof and then into the museum’s entry canopy.

Sixty miles southeast of Dallas on the Cedar Creek Reservoir is this 4,600-square-foot house fit in amongst pine trees that the client had planted 40 years earlier. Designed by local firm Wernerfield Architects + Design, the one-story concrete-and-rusted-steel project snakes through the environment and blends in with its ceiling-to-floor sliding doors and full-height windows.

Martin Fenlon Architecture renovated a dilapidated 1920s bungalow in a little-known neighborhood of Los Angeles. The new frontispiece is made primarily of cedar, juxtapozing it with the remodeled existing house clad in charred cedar.

Gordon Parks Arts Hall, designed by Valerio Dewalt Train Associates, is one of the University of Chicago’s most recent additions to its campus. The building plays with the campus’ Collegiate Gothic theme, updating the look yet continuing to blend in.

The Independence Pass Residence, designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, is at the edge of a nature preserve in Aspen, nestled in between two hills with lovely views of a meadow, forests of evergreen and aspen trees, the Roaring Fork river, and the Rocky Mountains.