(2 of 3)
4 Antoine Predock: House In the capricious realm where world-class architectural reputations are created, Predock has had two things going against him: because he practices in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he has been dismissed as a regionalist, and because he is earnestly New Agey in explaining his architecture (elemental earth forces, invisible Native American residues, UFOS and so on), critics and tastemakers have not always granted him his considerable due. But he has consistently produced marvelous, singular work, and the house he just finished in the Dallas suburb of Highland Park is particularly fine. Set on a steep, forested site in a neighborhood of conventionally swanky Texas mansions, the new house is a not-quite-severe collage of limestone, concrete and black steel, simultaneously grave and jazzy. Nor is it simply a multimillion-dollar one-liner: the entrance to the place is one thing (giant, portentous limestone chunks), the inside quite another (vast, airy volumes), and the rear (a huge, mirrorized steel plate) still another. Out back, a 60-ft. ramp projects uselessly and wonderfully up into the sky. With its impeccable detailing and rich, complex plan, the building reinvigorates the idea of the modernist villa.
5 Kent Larson: Louis Kahn's Hurva Synagogue Kahn, one of the 20th century's greatest architects, died in 1974 before the synagogue was built in Jerusalem, and the project died with him. Yet now it exists, virtually, thanks to a stunning act of digital cyber-architecture by architect Larson and computer expert Koji Tsuchiya. They have concocted 20 uncannily realistic ''views'' on a Silicon Graphics workstation. Even the materials are authentic, since Larson digitized photos of the concrete, stone and wood from Kahn's Center for British Art at Yale and used them to ''build'' the synagogue.
6 Douglas Green: ETA Furniture ETA stands for ''easy to assemble,'' and it is, since Green, a Maine-based designer-craftsman, has conceived, refined and started manufacturing the Arts and Craftsy pieces himself. They come in kits and are made of solid cherrywood, not veneer. The component timbers are precisely slotted and notched to fit without nails, screws or glue. In each instance, the final component -- for instance, the top of the dining table -- acts as a keystone to hold the item together. It's the '90s ideal: classic, ingenious, unpretentious, real.
7 James Stewart Polshek: Ed Sullivan Theater Renovation If you're paying one person $42 million to host America's best late-night talk show, why skimp on the studio? Within weeks of announcing David Letterman's arrival early this year, CBS bought the old vaudeville theater, thus committing itself to a crazy, six-month renovation schedule. Polshek, an unerring and seriously underrated architect, not only rewired and replumbed the place and removed the cat-size rats and the running stream from the basement, but he also peeled away 57-year-old walls to discover the theater's original four-story Neo-Gothic apses on either side of the stage and, throughout the theater, a vast amount of decorative plasterwork, 40% of which ! needed replacing. In addition, a modern TV infrastructure had to be implanted without seriously disturbing any of the splendid 1927 shell. For all that, the total cost was still probably less than Letterman earns in a year.