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\n Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: AIDIA, Getty, Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, K\u00e9r\u00e9 Architecture,\n <\/p>\n
For a global city, New York can be awfully provincial. Its architecture firms export designs across the world, but only a handful of outside auteurs manage to penetrate the city\u2019s insular development world, not always with great success. The reputations of Frank Gehry<\/a>, Zaha Hadid<\/a>, Rem Koolhaas, Shigeru Ban<\/a>, Bernard Tschumi, Alvaro Siza, and Tadao Ando do not depend on the one or two buildings each of them have bestowed on New York. (Jean Nouvel and Santiago Calatrava have had slightly more impact.)<\/p>\n For public projects, the pool of global talent is even narrower. The city\u2019s Design Excellence program<\/a>, which prequalifies firms to design libraries, firehouses, and other civic buildings, is theoretically open to designers based anywhere as long as they employ or partner with an architect licensed in New York State. In practice, though, the list is largely made up of people who bump into each other at the Century Association or the Center for Architecture; even firms that originated abroad, like Sn\u00f8hetta<\/a> (Norway) and BIG<\/a> (Denmark), have essentially become local. One of the very few welcome interlopers is the Chicago-based Studio Gang, which supplied Brooklyn with a firehouse and a recreation center<\/a>.<\/p>\n That makes sense; working for the city requires the ability to navigate a convoluted bureaucracy and attend innumerable community meetings. But it also means that New York is missing out on the ideas of designers who could find surprising paths through an obstacle course of conventions, whose experience with the constraints and cultures of other continents might loosen New York\u2019s rigid set of habits. Foreign architects could do for the urban landscape what so many immigrants have done for food, music, literature, and street life: enrich our culture and adapt to it at the same time.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that architecture doesn\u2019t always travel well; a bamboo roof won\u2019t survive a New York winter, and you can\u2019t just get a few thousand volunteers to replaster the walls each year<\/a>. But a northern climate, stringent building codes, and the gauntlet of public review shouldn\u2019t exclude the immense trove of experienced professionals who have worked in big, dense cities that are more similar to than different from ours.<\/p>\n Hoping to stoke some healthy cravings, I\u2019ve assembled a small fantasy league of international architects and paired each firm with a real city project that is in the early stages and not yet assigned to any designers. The firms I\u2019ve chosen range in size, age, fame, and length of track record, but they have one thing in common: They have never built in New York.<\/p>\n The projects, too, vary in scope and complexity, and they fall under the purview of the Department of Design and Construction (DDC) or the Economic Development Corporation (EDC). All have been approved (and some have budgets), but they have a long way to go. My goal with these imaginary pairings isn\u2019t to interfere with the public process, bypass community engagement, or foist a premature selection on a project before it is even underway. Rather, it\u2019s to encourage architects who love our city from a distance to get involved here, and to offer readers (and decision-makers) a glimpse of a wider architectural panorama than the city we live in has reckoned with.<\/p>\n Country: Burkina Faso\/Germany \n Rendering of the Las Vegas Museum of Art, currently under construction. The Berlin-based K\u00e9r\u00e9 may be the architect most admired by those who have never seen his work in the flesh. He became internationally famous (and won a Pritzker Prize) primarily for a few school buildings he designed for Gando, his home village in his native Burkina Faso, but his portfolio now includes large-scale projects like the library<\/a> he\u2019s designed for a new planned neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, an intriguing combination of cultural architecture and urbanism.<\/p>\n K\u00e9r\u00e9 has developed his sensibility by spanning radically different worlds. In Gando, he imported his knowledge of European concrete to harden rammed-earth blocks that villagers could fabricate on their own. The ancient stack-effect techniques he refined to suck the brutal African heat up through the ceiling and keep the air flowing through classrooms will help cool the Las Vegas Museum of Art<\/a>, a large stone basket with a cantilevered canopy like a wide-brimmed, rectilinear sombrero. The experience of Gando will also enrich a timber day-care center now going up on a noisy street in Munich. His first U.S. project, completed in 2019, was the Xylem Pavilion<\/a>, an open-sided forest of hanging logs designed for an arts center in Montana, which demonstrates just how deft he is at creating a small but profoundly moving space out of the simplest elements.<\/p>\n \n Ker\u00e9\u2019s Xylem Pavilion in Montana. \n Inside the Xylem Pavilion. Given how smoothly he has been able to bridge the rural and metropolitan parts of his life, there\u2019s something karmic about the notion of him making his New York debut with a\u00a0visitor center for a farm museum in the heart of Queens. Details about the project are scant, but for someone like K\u00e9r\u00e9, that provisional vagueness would represent an opportunity. Few architects are better qualified to connect today\u2019s city kids with their agrarian heritage.<\/p>\n \n A rendering of the Biblioteca dos Saberes in Rio de Janeiro, currently under construction. Country: Japan \n Nakamura\u2019s Ribbon Chapel. Contemporary urban construction is often as specialized as a hospital\u2019s medical staff: One set of experts designs the fa\u00e7ade, another fits out the interiors, a third greens the plaza out front. Nakamura, who works almost exclusively in his native Japan, smooths over those divisions, creating reverent, porous structures that open to the landscape or curl in on themselves in repose. His Ribbon Chapel<\/a> at a wedding venue in the southern port city of Onomichi consists of two intertwined curls of staircase that rise up in a double helix above the guests;\u00a0the bride descends one, the groom the other, until they meet at the altar. In a roadside brewery<\/a> in the zero-waste village of Kamikatsu in Tokoshima, the pub\u2019s triple-height seating area looks like a collage of windows in every size, affording a vertical panorama of mountains.<\/p>\n \n Kamikatz Public House, a brewery by Nakamura. Nakamura is masterful at setting buildings in the countryside, but he also manages to incorporate nature into the dense urban weave of Hiroshima. In the Optical Glass House<\/a>, he placed an indoor arbor right up against the sidewalk, shielded from street noise and pollution by a wall of custom glass blocks. Residents look out at the city as if through a sheet of falling water. Even when working on a large scale and with intense technical demands, such as at Tokyo\u2019s Haneda Airport Terminal 2<\/a>, he maintains a sense of delicacy and detail.<\/p>\n Nakamura designs for lingerers. His control of calm is just what\u2019s needed for a New York library. Although the Bloomingdale branch<\/a> now occupies its own (recently renovated) two-story building and shares a forecourt with a health-department facility, both buildings will eventually be razed and replaced by an affordable housing complex. If the design takes New York\u2019s fallback course, the library could be swallowed into a plain brown box. Nakamura might be just the right antidote to business as usual, a designer capable of giving a crucial community space its own quietly poetic identity.<\/p>\n \n Haneda Airport. Country: Lebanon\/France \n Ghotmeh\u2019s Serpentine Pavilion. Ghotmeh leaped several reputational rungs when she was commissioned to design the 2023 Serpentine Pavilion in London and produced a ravishing timber-frame rosette as a gathering room<\/a>. It\u2019s the sort of precious one-off that can present an architectural aesthetic in distilled form, freed from the constraints of plumbing, commerce, and protesting neighbors. Then she swung toward maximum logistical complexity when she won the competition to overhaul the British Museum, giving it what director Nicholas Cullinan has called \u201ca complete holistic transformation, top to bottom, inside out,\u201d with a budget north of $1 billion. Although details are still scarce, the project is not about plunking a new architectural icon down in Bloomsbury or competing with Norman Foster\u2019s great glass dome<\/a>. Rather, it\u2019s about excavating and reassembling the guts of an immense complex to bare its history as well as its treasure.<\/p>\n That experience will have prepared her well for the ultimate office-to-residential conversion, the project to gut and rebuild the New York City housing department\u2019s ungainly fortress headquarters into 3,700 apartments (a quarter of them rent regulated), plus 40,000 square feet of open space and a senior center. 100 Gold Street is a less glamorous hulk than a world-class museum, but it needs an architect with a sense of how destruction and construction mark each other without either needing to obliterate the other. Ghotmeh\u2019s Stone Garden<\/a> in Beirut expresses the feeling of a city familiar with the violence of demolition and the excitement of rebirth. The apartment building is a kind of lived-in memorial, a tough but graceful tower scored with grooves and pocked by windows and balconies of various sizes, asserting its right to elegance.<\/p>\n \n From left: Ghotmeh\u2019s Stone Garden tower in Beirut. Photo: Iwan BaanPhoto: Iwan Baan Photography\n <\/p>\n \n From top: Ghotmeh\u2019s Stone Garden tower in Beirut. Photo: Iwan BaanPhoto: Iwan Baan Photography\n <\/p>\n Country: Iran\/U.K. \n The Ismaili Center in Houston. Moussavi\u2019s first major building in the U.S., the Ismaili Center in Houston<\/a>, is both delicate and monumental. It presides over its own acropolis with an interlocking set of white modernist boxes, like a Texas flatland version of the Getty Center in L.A. Closer up, though, it becomes less austere and more sensual; its interplay of gauzy screens filter the harsh light. A stand of tall, slender columns elevates a leaf-thin canopy above an open-air rooftop caf\u00e9. The interplay of geometries in the atrium recalls one of the landmark fusions of modernist architecture and Middle Eastern tradition: I.M. Pei\u2019s Museum of Islamic Art in Doha<\/a>. That work of religious, cultural, and civic architecture might make her firm seem like an odd choice to turn a 120-acre waterfront site into a combination freight port, cruise terminal, and residential neighborhood. But when she was still part of London-based Foreign Office Architects, Moussavi designed the celebrated Yokohama Port Terminal<\/a>. This is far more than just a transit hall for passengers on the way on or off their cruise ships; it\u2019s a rooftop park stacked on top of a convention center, a dramatic mash-up of origami folds, ship\u2019s hull, and undulating topography.<\/p>\n \n Inside the Ismaili Center. The Brooklyn Marine Terminal needs the kind of creative eye that can follow the thread linking tiny details to a megaproject plan. The site is being divided into several parcels, one destined for a Yokohama-like building with an attached hotel, another for housing, a third for\u00a0shipping perishable freight. (The terminal is now one of the city\u2019s primary entry points for bananas.) The result could feel like an exciting extension of Brooklyn Bridge Park into a working waterfront \u2014 or it could yield a dud of cheap towers and rote esplanade. Moussavi\u2019s track record suggests that her firm could infuse a landscape of gantries and shipping containers with some genuine musicality. You can sense the promise of that in La Folie Divine<\/a>, a nine-story affordable housing tower on the outskirts of Montpellier, which resembles a stack of concrete amoebas; it\u2019s really a cylinder wrapped with undulating balconies that offer views out to the city but not into neighbors\u2019 turf.<\/p>\n \n The Yokohama Port Terminal. \n La Folie Divine, a housing project by Moussavi. Country: Mexico and Poland \n Mercado Nicol\u00e1s Bravo in Quintana Roo, Mexico. One of the largest projects goes to the smallest studio, which is run by a Mexico City\u2013based couple who are graduates of brand-name firms: Hadid, Foster, and Nouvel. They\u2019d have to team up with some well-resourced veterans of New York public works, but they would contribute two crucial qualities: a talent for squeezing delight out of simplicity and the impulse to ennoble basic public structures. In Mexico, they turned a menu of basics \u2014 brick-hued concrete, barrel vaults, and perforated walls \u2014 into a calming community center<\/a> in a Zapotec village in Oaxaca. And they protected the artisan market in the deep southern town of Nicol\u00e1s Bravo (near Mayan ruins and the border with Belize) with a rhythmically undulating roof<\/a> of steel trusses, clay, and concrete. Both projects prove that artistry doesn\u2019t have to be costly; both designs had modest budgets and rich ambitions.<\/p>\n \n DIF Community Center in San Pedro Comitancillo, Oaxaca, Mexico. In Mexico, such straightforward, graceful structures can nurture a burble of activities: selling crafts, supervising grandchildren, serving tamales, teaching dance classes, holding political meetings. There\u2019s no need for elaborate, high-tech designs, only a sensitivity to ventilation, shade, openness, and materials that feel rooted in local life. The Brownsville project would be a leap. The architects would have to cope with winter and pack an oddly shaped site with a dense program of leisure and sports. But AIDIA\u2019s founders relished the challenge and quickly began sketching out an arrangement of barrel-vaulted spaces and rooftop pickleball courts shaded by a hivelike canopy. That kind of year-round protection for outdoor sports seems like an obvious plus for a city with weather as extreme as ours, but, aside from the LeFrak Center rink in Prospect Park and the basketball courts in Brooklyn Bridge Park, it practically doesn\u2019t exist here. Even these early sketches demonstrate that they understand how to frame a gym and a pool so it\u2019s not just an amenity but a genuine civic space.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: AIDIA, Getty, Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, K\u00e9r\u00e9 Architecture, For a global city, New York can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[230,228,226,227,248028,220746,229,167792,88,144746],"class_list":{"0":"post-559366","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-architecture","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-civic-architecture","13":"tag-ddc","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-design-excellence","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-street-view"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Firm: K\u00e9r\u00e9 Architecture<\/a>
Project: Queens County Farm Museum Education Center<\/a>
Client: DDC for Parks Department
Budget: $50 million
Scale: 18,000 square feet
Location: 73-50 Little Neck Parkway, Glen Oaks<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1e2d5c1592bfd823a2cad697373c792843-2-Plaza-View---Ke-re--Architecture--Cour.rhorizontal.w900.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Ke\u0301re\u0301 Architecture\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/b05a7c87c87716860734b77b3202ebbefa-Bird-s-eye-view-of-Xylem-Ke-re--Architec.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Iwan Baan\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5d5a5386c1b8e02546ba9f3f1e64447c50-116-Tippet-Rise---Ke-re--Architecture--7.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: K\u00e9r\u00e9 Architecture\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/daa4a5a92dbc0c8c094cece88f4eacee4f-02-Southwest-view---Ke-re--Architecture.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Ke\u0301re\u0301 Architecture\n <\/p>\n
Firm: NAP<\/a>
Project: Bloomingdale Library and Affordable Housing<\/a>
Client: EDC
Budget: TBD
Scale: Tower complex on a 46,000-square-foot lot
Location: West 100th Street, Upper West Side<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/b2549ec25a0ce41445a0e844ae7e3e8362-13-10--2-.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Nacasa & Partners Inc.\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/3e18d09d9aa2d0d64fc785b24bc6a7feee-148899279613618beaa03-af21-4f9c-b835-833.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Nacasa & Partners Inc.\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/b8dd87155d5de5c6770cb7c82a91845656-hnd2-007-CDaici-Ano.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Daici Ano\n <\/p>\n
Firm: Lina Ghotmeh Architecture<\/a>
Project: 100 Gold Street<\/a>
Client: EDC and Department of Housing Preservation and Development
Budget: TBD
Size: TBD<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/a7bb4d2a6094e892c8b0983231bba96cdb-LGA-Serpentine-Pavilion-Iwan-Baan--6-.rhorizontal.w900.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Iwan Baan\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/8472ea2fbb9c8404a6d350901e094ee446-LGA-Stone-Garden-Iwan-Baan--2-.rdeep-vertical.w460.jpg\")
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Firm: Farshid Moussavi Architecture<\/a>
Project: Brooklyn Marine Terminal
Budget: $3.5 billion
Size: 120 acres<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/883d59d1439444dd04eaa2843da28a12c4-The-building-and-sky-are-mirrored-in-the.rhorizontal.w900.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Iwan Baan\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/671db7586eb74570b6846bc3a21604b89d-Ismaili-Center-Houston-FMA-0404.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Iwan Baan\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/84425368654de86161b49cae4ff54ff17e-yipt-0702-satoru-mishima-01.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
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\n Photo: Satoru Mishima\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/73ed76fea8fd82b5a709e35f3970886fdd-Folie-Divine-Housing-4Montpellier--Franc.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Stephen Gill\n <\/p>\n
Firm: AIDIA<\/a>
Project: Brownsville Recreation Center
Client: DDC for Parks Department
Budget: $240 million
Size: 74,000 square feet<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/811d98d0b08c14ba4e93a16e6d8395047e-01-MercadoNicolasBravo---AIDIA-Studio.rhorizontal.w900.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Courtesy of AIDIA Studio\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/a0dac8a7d50c7122877cd1759630922d95-AIDIASTUDIO-CentroDIF-29.rsquare.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Courtesy of AIDIA Studio\n <\/p>\n