Whereas the major monuments of modern architecture in the 20th century were mostly concentrated in the United States and western Europe, contemporary architecture is global; important new buildings have been built in China, Russia, Latin America, and particularly in Arab states of the Persian Gulf; the Burj Khalifa in Dubai was the tallest building in the world in 2019, and the Shanghai Tower in China was the second-tallest.

Many were designed by architects already famous in the late 20th century, including Mario Botta, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster, Ieoh Ming Pei and Renzo Piano, while others are the work of a new generation born during or after World War II, including Zaha Hadid, Santiago Calatrava, Daniel Libeskind, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, and Shigeru Ban.

The entire wooden structure is covered with a white fiberglass membrane, and a coating of teflon protects from direct sunlight and allows light to pass through.

The Louis Vuitton Foundation by Frank Gehry (2014) is the gallery of contemporary art located adjacent to the Bois de Boulogne in Paris was opened in October 2014.

[16] Similar in concept to Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, the building is wrapped in curving glass panels resembling sails inflated by the wind.

[17] Inside the sails is a cluster of two-story towers containing 11 galleries of different sizes, with flower garden terraces, and rooftop spaces for displays.

Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of The New York Times called the building a "mishmash of styles" but noted its similarity to Piano's Centre Pompidou in Paris, in the way that it mixed with the public spaces around it.

[9] The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003) is one of the major works by California architect Frank Gehry The exterior is stainless steel, formed like the sails of sailboats.

The Casa da Musica in Porto, Portugal, by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (2005) is unique among concert halls in having two walls made entirely of glass.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic from The New York Times, wrote "The building's chiseled concrete form, resting on a carpet of polished stone, suggests a bomb about to explode.

The Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville, Tennessee, by David M. Schwarz & Earl Swensson (2006), is an example of Neo-Classical architecture, borrowed literally from Roman and Greek models.

The concert hall is at La Villette, in a park at the edge of Paris devoted to museums, a music school and other cultural institutions, where its unusual shape blends with the late 20th-century modern architecture.

[24] The Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, Germany, by Herzog & de Meuron, which was inaugurated in January 2017, is the tallest inhabited building in the city, with a height of 110 meters (360 feet).

The concert hall in the middle is isolated from the sound of the other parts of the building by an "eggshell" of plaster and paper panels and insulation resembling feather pillows.

It replaced the London Millennium Tower – a much taller project that Foster earlier had proposed for the same site, which would have been the tallest building in Europe, but was so tall that it interfered with the flight pattern for Heathrow Airport.

A tendency in contemporary residential architecture, particularly in the rebuilding of older neighborhoods in large cities, is the luxury condominium tower, with very expensive apartments for sale designed by "starchitects", that is, internationally famous architects.

The Northern Lights Cathedral, by the Denmark-based international firm of Schmidt, Hammer and Lassen, is located in Alta, Norway, one of northernmost cities in the world.

The Beijing National Stadium, built for the 2008 Games and popularly known as the Bird's Nest because of its intricate exterior framework, was designed by the Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron, with Chinese architect Li Xinggang.

Government buildings, once almost universally serious and sober looking, usually in variations of the school of neoclassical architecture, began to appear in more sculptural and even whimsical forms.

The unusual egg-like building design was intended to reduce the amount of exposed wall and to save energy, though the results have not entirely met expectations.

The building, by the edge of the Mediterranean, has shelf space for eight million books,[50] and a main reading room covering 20,000 square metres (220,000 sq ft) on eleven cascading levels.

The shopping malls are the elephants of commercial architecture, massive structures which combine retail stores, food outlets, and entertainment under a single roof.

The largest in area (though not in retail space, since much of the mall is devoted to entertainment and public space) and perhaps most extravagant is the Dubai Mall in the United Arab Emirates, designed by DP Architects of Singapore and opened in (2008), which features, in addition to shops and restaurants, a gigantic walk-through aquarium and underwater zoo, plus a huge ice skating rink, and, just outside, the highest fountain and tallest building in the world.

The department store exterior is composed of undulating concrete in convex and concave forms, entirely covered with gleaming blue and white ceramic tiles.

One notable example is the Louis Vuitton store in the Ginza district of Tokyo, with a new facade designed by Japanese studio of Jun Aoki and Associates with a patterned and perforated shell based on the brand's logo.

The World Trade Center Transportation Hub is a station constructed beneath fountain and plaza honoring the victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, It was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and opened in 2016.

Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of The New York Times praised the soaring upward view inside the Oculus, but condemned what he called the buildings cost (the most expensive railroad station ever built) "scale, monotony of materials and color, preening formalism and disregard for the gritty urban fabric.

[57] BedZED, designed by British architect Bill Dunster, is an entire community of eighty-two homes in Hackbridge, near London, built according to eco-architecture principles.

Houses face south to take advantage of sunlight and have triple-glazed windows for insulation, a significant portion of the energy comes from solar panels, rainwater is collected and reused, and automobiles are discouraged.

[59] Unusual materials are sometimes recycled for use in eco-architecture; they include denim from old blue jeans for insulation, and panels made from paper flakes, baked earth, flax, sisal, or coconut, and particularly fast-growing bamboo.