In a town renowned for its spectacular architecture, the new Aqua Tower has become the latest attraction in Chicago’s skyline. Designed by Jeanne Gang, principal of Studio Gang Architects, the 82-story mixed-use building is much more than the standard straight rectangular glass tower. The contoured façade appears to undulate, rippling between waves of concrete balcony overhangs and organically shaped areas of glass that mirror back the sky.

Although this undulation seems random as if formed by nature, it was designed to serve an environmental purpose. The balcony overhangs shade the interior from the scorching summer sun keeping interior temperatures fairly even, and they protect the building from Chicago’s heavy winds — so much so that the building doesn’t require a tuned mass damper to stabilize it against wind vibrations and sway. Built to LEED certification, Aqua Tower incorporated many other green and energy-efficient features, including an 80,000 square foot rooftop garden and six different types of window glazing to cut solar load on the exposed glass.

Aqua Tower earned another surprising milestone distinction: This is the tallest building in the world designed by a woman. Given that we are in the 21st century, it’s about time.

Typically, the observation platforms of landmark buildings are designed to offer breathtaking views of the city, not vice versa. At the ARoS Museum of Modern Art in Aarhus, Denmark, the recently completed viewing tower on the roof is its own work of art. Designed by renowned Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, the circular glass walkway is a multi-colored halo crowning the brick cubic structure built in 2003 by Aarhus-based Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects.

Known locally as “Your Rainbow Panorama,” the museum’s walkway invites visitors to see the city through curved colored glass arranged in the color spectrum. Explaining his intent, Eliasson says, “I have created a space which virtually erases the boundaries between inside and outside – where people become a little uncertain as to whether they have stepped into a work or into part of the museum. This uncertainty is important to me, as it encourages people to think and sense beyond the limits within which they are accustomed to moving.”

Famed rapper Ice Cube (aka O’Shea Jackson), who once studied architectural drafting, riffs on Los Angeles’s quirky landmarks such as the Cockatoo Inn and Five Torches, freeways and the Eames House for a video series produced by Pacific Standard Time, a collaborative effort among Southern California cultural Institutions to spotlight L.A.’s art scene between 1945 and 1980. Ice Cube avoids the lofty language of architectural experts and gives his take in terms that the street can understand. Talking about The Eames house, Ice Cube reflects that with Charles and Ray Eames “it’s not about the pieces, it’s about how the pieces work together,” and notes that they did “mashups before mashups even existed.” Way ahead of their time, he adds, “The Eames made structure and nature one. This is going green 1949 style, bitch. Believe that.”

Those who really want to get into religion may want to check out the Son of Heaven Hotel, better known in China as the Tianzi Garden Hotel. Located in the little town of Langfang, Hebei Province, near Beijing, the hotel is constructed in the likeness of three traditional Chinese gods — (left to right) Shou, the god of longevity; Fu, the god of fortune, and Lu, the god of prosperity.

The ten-story hotel was recognized in 2001 by Guinness World Record for being the “world’s biggest image hotel.” The rooms are said to be “adequate,” but the Son of Heaven Hotel does have two suites — one in the “peach” held in Shou’s hand and a presidential suite on the ninth floor. The windows are camouflaged by the brocade-like pattern. The inconspicuous hotel entrance is on the left, at the bottom of Shou’s long sleeve. It is unclear whether any guestrooms are available in Shou, Fu and Lu’s heads. Although this hotel has not received a prestigious Michelin star rating, if you get to sleep in the hand or belly of a god, it’s bound to be a heavenly experience.

You’ve heard the barroom ditty “99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall”? Well, try this one: “33,000 beer crates forming a wall, 33,000 beer crates …”

Asked by their client, Atomium, to construct a temporary pavilion in Brussels to mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal World Exhibition, SHSH, an architectural firm with offices in Brussels, London and Sendai, constructed a “package” exhibition space out of 33,000 recycled plastic beer crates.

“This project was an exercise in how a common item can transcend itself and become architecture, rather than mere object or even mere building,” explains SHSH (Shin Bogdan Hagiwara and Shizuka Hariu). “…we decided to use a material extracted from the daily life of an ordinary consumer. Hence, a plastic beer crate is used as a generic element – like bricks, but deployed beyond its individual characteristics. This allowed us to explore many common architectural features such as columns, arches, and domes…and form a huge and enigmatic interior environment.”

SHSH adds that the selection of empty beer crates, linked together like giant Lego blocks, “allowed us to reduce the time of assembly and disassembly, and to produce a series of spaces that far exceeds the mere accumulation of common elements in an architectural format.” The light filtering through the thousands of beer crates creates a reverent cathedral-like atmosphere that makes the space an art exhibit itself.

On the hard-packed sands of California’s Mojave Desert stands a surreal sight. Hundreds of decommissioned commercial jets are lined up row after row, in the middle of nowhere. Their engines are taped shut with Mylar to keep out drifting sands. This is a graveyard for retired jets, many of which originally cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Now they only serve as awnings for rattle snakes and reptiles that take shelter from the unrelenting sun. Some planes may be stripped of useful parts that can be reconditioned. Others may be bought by a third-world country or short-hop commuter startup. And still others will simply languish there for years – a kind of “Stonehenge” of the 21st century.

A few jets have been creatively repurposed, including a 747 jumbo jet that is being turned into a house on the hills of glamorous Malibu, near Los Angeles. When architect David Hertz was asked by his client to build a home with curvilinear feminine shapes and a kind of floating roof, he imagined the wings of a plane. That led to purchasing a retired 747 for a mere $35,000, and disassembling it to create the skeleton of the house. The wings and tail stabilizers are being used as a roof for the master bedroom. Part of the fuselage and the upper first-class cabin form the guesthouse, and even the cargo hold is being put to use as a horse barn. The so-called Wing House is expected to be completed by year-end.

Recently a number of Pantone-color inspired products have been introduced into the marketplace. There’s the Pantone chip mug by W2, the Pantone cufflinks by Sonia Spencer, the Pantone stationery and bags by Alpha, and now there is the new Pantone Hotel in Brussels, created in a licensing partnership with a British developer.

Designed by Belgian interior designer Michel Penneman and Belgian architect Olivier Hannaert, the seven-story boutique hotel is alive with chic, contemporary colors, all matched to Pantone’ color swatches. Guestrooms are appointed with white walls and bedding to create a neutral backdrop for Belgian photographer Victor Levy’s photographic installations featuring a spectrum of vibrant Pantone colors. The public spaces equally reflect Pantone’s skill at applying color psychology and design trends to create an environment that is at once convivial, happy, and relaxing.

Kutner rallied the community of roughly 860 people living in the village and surrounding area and together they collected more than 4,000 discarded plastic soda bottles. From there, students and volunteers used sticks and hands to cram the plastic bottles with more plastic — used bags, packaging and grocery sacks – to give the containers heft and form, then stacked them like bricks held in place by chicken wire, and “stuccoed” them with a cement-sand mixture.

Kutner says her inspiration came from a Guatemalan group called Pura Vida, which created bottle-filled “eco-block” construction material.

In Granados, villagers not only gained a new schoolhouse, they became acutely aware of how much non-biodegradable trash they produced. One man even began collecting aluminum cans and hauling them to a recycling center four hours away.

As commendable as this effort is, the challenge of dealing with plastic garbage, which takes more than 200 years to break down, is huge. Statistics show that the U.S. alone produces more than 25 million tons of plastic per year and about 8% of the world’s oil consumption is used to manufacture plastics of all types. The belief that plastic garbage is a problem faced by cities in developed countries is just urban myth; it accumulates in the most remote rural areas too.

The Day Labor Station was created by Public Architecture, a nonprofit design firm started by architect John Peterson in 2002. Previously, Peterson ran a private architectural firm that engaged in designing multimillion-dollar homes in the San Francisco Bay Area. His office was located in San Francisco’s industrial warehouse district, near weedy abandoned lots and noisy freeway traffic. Peterson’s initiative to create a friendly sidewalk plaza on an open space made him realize that he could improve the lives of those who lived in the neighborhood.

But starting Public Architecture by seeking foundation and grant money in some ways caught Peterson by surprise. “I don’t come from a background of feeling responsibility to work for social causes,” Peterson admits. “I’m very much like the students and practitioners who came out of design-centered schools. There needed to be a purity about the design. I believed that if you muddied it with a social agenda, or even with financial issues, it would dilute the design quality.”

Still, Peterson couldn’t shake the idea that architecture could be used for social good. What if the 240,000 architects working in the U.S. donated 1% of their time to pro bono assignments? That would add up to nearly 5 million hours a year. In reality, architecture firms have been generous in donating their services, but have done so in a less systematic and effective way. Public Architecture conceived the One Percent program to connect nonprofit organizations in need of design assistance with architecture and design firms willing to donate their services, and took this concept nationwide. Today projects of “1% firms” range from a radical new design for a children’s hospital room to the design and construction of a “scraphouse” to demonstrate that a home could be built entirely of salvaged materials.

Recently, the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction in Switzerland gave Public Architecture its 2009 Innovation Award for its Day Labor Station concept. In choosing the Day Labor Station out of thousands of submissions worldwide, Holcim praised it for “creating a sensitive environment for people who find themselves on the edge of the community and at the same time addressing health and safety needs.”

Today Peterson is dedicating nearly all of his time to Public Architecture programs, but he professes, “I still deeply believe in the purity of design. I just think that the issues we should be tackling need to expand. It has to include social justice. I don’t think that mission needs to limit design opportunities in any way.”