1 James Ingo Freed: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It's hard to imagine a more difficult architectural commission: design a museum devoted to the Holocaust that is also a fitting memorial to its victims -- and make it beautiful and decorous, and put it on the Mall in Washington, which has heretofore been reserved for stone commemorations of American goodness (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln) and American tragedy (Vietnam). And it's hard to imagine a more successful job of it than that managed by architect Freed, a partner of I.M. Pei's. With its exhibits designed by Ralph Appelbaum, Freed's museum is neither a pious, too-easy-to-take abstraction nor a meretriciously Disneyesque Auschwitz-land; rather it is a craftsmanlike, thoughtful and powerfully disturbing hybrid of both, a ghastly but never wholly literal evocation of the camps as well as a sublime contemplation of history (even, with its Speerish neoclassical facade, architectural history) and memory.
2 Frank Gehry: Weisman Art Museum Like Frank Lloyd Wright, Gehry, 64, seems to become fresher and more creative as he ages. This year's masterwork is the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The smallish museum concentrates on 20th century American art, and the exterior can be seen as a tough, gleefully manic (that is, American) work of Cubist sculpture or as a giant brushed-stainless-steel popcorn kernel, or as a wizard's castle in some 23rd century fairy tale. Inside, where huge skylights bathe the galleries in sunlight, the feeling is serene but never static.
3 Davids Killory: Daybreak Grove The proportion of America's homeless population consisting of families with children increased 30% during 1993, according to a report issued last week. Which makes Daybreak Grove, a tiny but splendid attempt in the San Diego exurb of Escondido to give a few impoverished families homes, all the more heartening. The project shows that low-income housing need not be dreary or demeaning: this is a lively and dignified piece of tightly woven architecture. Architects Christine Killory and her partner, Chilean-born Rene Davids, have used as their central idea a traditional Latin American form: each two- and three-bedroom unit is built around a small internal patio, and all 13 are arrayed around a central plaza and playground.