Ten years in the making, Iraqi-born architectural phenomenon, Zaha Hadid’s Museum of Art for the XXI Century, or MAXXI, is finally completed. Located in Rome, the museum’s contemporary design is a pleasant and eye-catching addition to the city’s mostly historic feel. Housing contemporary art and architecture, the 26,000 square metre building includes moveable hanging partitions that allow gallery-goers to move freely across the space, as well as stand and stare.

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Italian architect Antonio Cardillo is of the opinion that architecture is only still in pictures, as in its real life it is in a state of transition with man and light moving through it. This ‘house of convexities’ near Barcelona is an embodiment of Cardillo’s question that, if architecture is music, then can its limbs dance? There is no doubt that his architecture has a quality that plays with transition and light and that this is one of the most beautiful renderings around.

As China’s cities, infrastructure, and economy boomed under the reforms post 1979, Deng Xiaoping insisted that agriculture, industry, and urban areas should all be close together, so that no materials needed to be transported very far. This wreaked havoc on China’s ecology and environment. In the West, however, the circumstances of development have been different, and it’s increasingly the consensus that urban space can and should be used for purposes traditionally relegated to rural farmland. This is the concept behind the collaboration between designer Chris Jacobs and Dr. Dickson Despommier of Columbia University, who have designed skyscraper farms that could provide sustenance to the massive urban populations of the future, who may not have access to any un-urbanized land at all.