[David Ford of Crown Corr]

Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is the sixth busiest airport in the world and the third busiest in the United States serving nearly 63.7 million passengers – including 17 million international passengers – in 2012. Visitors are drawn to Los Angeles to experience everything from the area’s temperate coastal climate and beaches to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood movie-making.

The University of North Texas’ (UNT) Apogee Stadium – the first newly constructed collegiate football stadium in the nation to earn LEED Platinum certification – opened in Denton, Texas, in September 2011 as the new home of Mean Green football.

The new 14-story $654-million hospital building at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, which is referred to as The Tower, stands out on the city’s skyline with a unique butterfly design and striking white exterior – both visual symbols of the medical center’s goal to transform healthcare delivery. Formable Alucobond® Plus aluminum composite material in the custom Spinnaker Bone White color was selected to realize the hospital’s shining, clean exterior image and its unique butterfly design.

When design of the VanDusen Botanical Garden Visitor Centre was awarded to Perkins+Will Canada in late 2007, architects were challenged to create a building that not only would increase visibility for and attract more visitors to the approximately 54-acre internationally recognized garden in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, but also meet the highest goals in sustainable building design.

The practical goal of the new $61-million 21-story Student Residence Hall at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) in Boston may have been to provide 145,600 square feet of on-campus accommodations for 493 students when it opens in the fall of 2012.  But the unique design of the new Residence Hall – which is clad in 5,500 Alucobond® Plus aluminum composite panels in seven custom colors that are dimensionally positioned with glass to invoke Gustav Klimt’s 1909 “Tree of Life” painting – has met an aesthetic goal to set the building apart on the Boston skyline and, thereby, create an idiosyncratic image for MassArt.

As part of The State University of New York (SUNY), Stony Brook University on Long Island’s north shore, is part of the nation’s largest and most comprehensive state university system, which web site states “ is committed to providing quality education at an affordable price.”  So, when new residence halls recently were required to meet the needs of Stony Brook’s fast-growing student population, both budget and time constraints played important roles in the buildings’ architectural design.