Building a wooden underground house in the jungle required patience and careful planning. Digging below ground by hand made every mistake harder to correct, especially when working with natural wood.

The assumption that wood houses are not made to last is simply that: an assumption—and an incorrect one at that. The oldest wood building in the world is Japan’s Hōryū-ji pagoda, which has a cypress ...

Four years ago, the Pritzker Prize–winner Tadao Ando spectacularly converted a 1920s apartment building in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago into exhibition spaces for a gallery named—in ...