The Learning Curve Out: Educational, medical, and office design reaches new heights

1. Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA Project: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.

Standout: Inside the polytechnic’s Rolex Learning Center, light wells, courtyards, and patios define an undulating open plan—with a grace recently cited by the judges of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Photography: Roland Halbe.

2. PAL Design Consultants
Project: Winning Real Estate Group, Hangzhou, China.

Standout: Multicolored fluorescents enhance transluscent honeycomb panels and faceted plasterboard forms, turning a mundane sales office into a luminous landscape.

Photography: Courtesy of PAL Design Consultants.

3. Gnädinger Architekten
Project: Otto Bock Science Center Medizintechnik, Berlin.

Standout: Human muscle fiber inspired the bands that wrap the reinforced-concrete frame of this six-story medical facility.

Photography: Courtesy of the Otto Bock Science Center Medizintechnik.

4. Ministry of Design
Project: Face to Face, Singapore.

Standout: Strips of LED and fluorescent light visually connect this office building’s exterior to the interior, where a spiral staircase literally links the ground level to basement meeting rooms.

Photography: Edward Hendricks/CI&A Photography.

5. Caterina Tiazzoldi/Nuova Ordentra
Project: Toolbox, Turin, Italy.

Standout: At this incubator facility, painted Styrofoam boxes stack seemingly at random in reception, a foretaste of the decorative walls that enclose mini offices for separate endeavors.

Photography: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano.

6. UAU
Project: Hitech Systems, Leini, Italy.

Standout: Opposites attract at this headquarters—whether curves and angles or cast concrete and curtain wall.

Photography: Enrico Muraro.