RESIDENTIAL RECLAMATIONS It's a spacious, imposing Los Angeles residence that has a central courtyard with lush vegetation and a cooling fountain. But don't look for palm trees or swimming pools or movie stars — this is no stereotypical Southern California abode. — Published 2008.1008
	BOWDOIN COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART Museums today aspire to be open, transparent, and welcoming. However admirable these qualities appear from our 21st-century viewpoint, it is instructive to remember that at the height of the Gilded Age, when the American museum was ascendant, the opposite was true. — Published 2008.0618
	CAST GLASS CENTERPIECE Take a spicy mixture of the visual and performing arts; add a wide range of support from university, government and civic sources; cover with an unusual application of glass and stir; serves 250,000. That's the "recipe" for the Shaw Center for the Arts, which Baton Rouge, Louisiana is counting on to lift its civic profile. — Published 2005.0615
	HOUSING BY HOLL A new dormitory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seems tailor-made for the school's super-geek culture. The building by Steven Holl has been compared variously to a giant Rubik's Cube and a 1950s computer punch card. — Published 2002.1120
	BOSTON AIR RIGHTS Creating urban land where none existed before seems to be a Boston tradition. Dredging of the Charles River and leveling of hills in the 1800s transformed a shallow backwater into the stylish Back Bay neighborhood. Now developable "plots" are being created by leasing of "air rights" over the portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike that traverses downtown. — Published 2002.0904
	BOSTON RECONNECTING As inconceivable as it may seem today, a wide swath of downtown Boston — including vibrant ethnic neighborhoods, historic pre-Revolutionary buildings, and a tangled but charming street pattern — was mowed down like weeds in the mid-1950s to make way for an elevated highway. This was decades before the Boston-as-perennial-boomtown that we've known recently. A master plan prepared in 1956 by I.M. Pei and Associates stated darkly: "Stagnation and resultant blight are the condition of the Boston peninsula." — Published 2001.0912

James McCown