Rolex Learning Center – Lausanne, Switzerland

If Salvadori Dali had designed a Swiss student center, it would probably have looked something like this undulating, drooping building/landscape in sheer curving sheets of glass and pristine white surfaces that opened in February. SANAA, its Japanese architect, designed the 289,000-square-foot high-tech art library and a host of other resources for students and faculty at the Swiss Institute of Technology to frame a variety of views of nearby Lake Geneva. The traffic-stopper cost some 110 million Swiss francs (about $102 million). A journalist for the British Observer wrote at the opening, “if you could live inside an iPad, it would look something like this.”