James S. Russell

My tour of the new Via Verde apartment complex began on a roof that sprouts just-planted Christmas trees.

After years of controversy and $150 million, the Barnes collection reopens today in a monumental new home not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Just off the narrow, crowded streets of Greenwich Village is a lush, spacious garden of drooping mature willows and sycamores.

The wandering throngs in Times Square point their mobile phones and digital cameras at the 230 flickering signs that ascend more than 20 stories over New York City’s central public square.

I enjoyed lamb ribs, fireworks and music by Lyle Lovett as Dallas celebrated the opening of the $182 million Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge by famed engineer and architect Santiago Calatrava.

I drove into the picture-book village of Goshen, New York, past the Gothic-style church that dominates Main Street. A bit farther on I came to the pile of concrete boxes that some deem a masterpiece.

Amid a housing market profoundly altered by stagnant incomes, declining wealth and Wall Street folly, the Museum of Modern Art displays a waterfall cascading down an atrium in a high-rise apartment.

Architect Wang Shu’s answer to the wholesale destruction of historic Chinese cities is to collect the stones of demolished buildings and install them in new ones.

Frank Gehry has built one of New York’s best new off-Broadway theaters, the Alice Griffin Jewel Box, as a scaled-down opera house.

An ordinary sales slip consigning a young woman to slavery is among the chilling items that will be displayed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

A youth presents a dead hare to a trio of elegantly dressed noblemen who appear to be dancing. Sleek hounds bound across a bucolic landscape.

In Seattle, contractors have begun digging for an office building that will eventually wear what looks like a big cocked hat.