ARCHITECTURE

Museum of Arts and Design, New York

Edward Durell Stone’s 1964 Gallery of Modern Art on the southern edge of Columbus Circle in Manhattan -- a building then-New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable famously dissed as a “Venetian palazzo on lollipops” -- was controversial from the start. How will its replacement fare? This month, the official opening on the site of the Museum of Arts and Design will tell the tale. The museum was designed by Portland, Ore., architect Brad Cloepfil after preservationists tried in vain to save the Stone original. Cloepfil and his firm, Allied Works Architecture, began by taking the building down to its skeleton and rearranging the galleries. Then they draped the entire volume in glazed terra-cotta panels sliced through with a narrow window band that snakes across the facade.

Sept. 27, www.madmuseum.org

California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

Renzo Piano took some lumps for his less-than-thrilling Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, but he seems poised for far better results with his new home for the California Academy of Sciences. The design concept is seductively simple: Piano proposed lifting the green carpet of Golden Gate Park and sliding the structure underneath. The academy claims the facility will be the “greenest museum ever constructed.” An undulating native garden will cover the 2 1/2 -acre roof, not only snugly insulating the building but also helping capture and filter nearly 2 million gallons of rainwater every year.

Sept. 27, www.calacademy.org

‘A New and Native Beauty: The Art and Craft of Greene & Greene’

There aren’t too many Southern California designers in more obvious need of reappraisal than the brothers Charles and Henry Greene, whose surname has become synonymous -- in a bland, rote sort of way -- with the American wing of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Pasadena bungalow. So, fortuitously, the Huntington, which has held the Greenes’ archive since 1988, is about to unveil what it calls “the most comprehensive exhibition ever undertaken” of their work. Included are 140 objects in all -- furniture, stained glass, metalwork and architectural drawings.

Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, Oct. 18 to Jan. 26, www.huntington.org

Art and Architecture Building at Yale University

Paul Rudolph’s building has been reviled, burned in a fire, sliced by knife-wielding architectural students and otherwise knocked around since opening in 1963, but it has finally been rescued by a restoration and extension overseen by New York architect Charles Gwathmey. Beginning Nov. 6, Yale will fete the spiffed-up structure with a weekend-long symposium considering the novelty and effect of its Brutalist scored-concrete design.

Yale University, New Haven, Conn., www.architecture.yale.edu

David Adjaye

A rising star of British architecture, Adjaye, born in 1966 in Tanzania, has already produced a clutch of notable residential designs -- many for visual artists and actors in London -- along with a group of small libraries and Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Like many of his most talented peers in Europe and in this country, he produces buildings that reject the formal experimentation of architects a generation older in favor of savvy, subtle designs, often simple connected boxes wrapped in rough or inexpensive materials. Adjaye will be in town for a lecture as part of the American Institute of Architects’ Masters of Architecture series.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Nov. 10, www.aialosangeles.org