Last week, Mary McCreesh got the kind of news that makes your heart sink: Her 82-year-old father was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

The idea of a transcontinental highway in the West, spanning from Mexico to Canada, has been kicking around for decades. The possibility of this “CANAMEX” route, bookended by two international trade ports, has stirred high hopes for greatly expanding trade opportunities, industrial development, and new jobs for people and communities throughout the West.

When the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health opened in 2009, it was praised for state-of-the-art programming and dedication to researching neurodegenerative disease. The next thunder of accolades went to its Frank Gehry-designed building: The sloping, stainless shell structure is composed of anomalous windows and 18,000 tiles that pop up as a warped assemblage of structures at the edge of Symphony Park.

A man with Alzheimer’s disease makes breakfast but forgets a pan on the stove, causing a small fire.

Lighting, wall color, acoustics and hallway shapes may seem like aesthetic-based choices in the world of interior design, but when it comes to health care environments, those decisions can impact patient success.

Our homes give us shelter and a welcome refuge from the hectic outside world. But can they also make us healthier?

Reinvention has always been the game in Las Vegas.

And we’ve seen many successful attempts at changing the city’s tourism landscape. Many more, however, failed or never got off the ground.

If you could design the ultimate playground, what would it look like?

The Waters kids came to a Oct. 10 Springs Preserve playground redesign workshop packed with ideas.

Imagine a bustling construction site where robots do most of the tradesmen’s dirty work, so to speak—hauling materials, climbing ladders, and navigating scaffolding. Assistant professor of architecture Michael Silver is leading the multidisciplinary Rust Belt Robotics Group at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, to develop humanoid robots that interact with people in dynamic environments.

A team of University of Nevada, Las Vegas students and faculty just won a Design Excellence Award for a house designed for the Moapa Band of Southern Paiute Indians. The team of engineering and architecture students, mainly from UNLV's Building Sciences and Sustainability graduate concentration, entered the Desert Sunrise Home in the Department of Energy's annual Race To Zero Student Design Competition.

From one era to the next, the Las Vegas Strip hotel-casino has been a case study in architecture and design evolution—inside and out.

1. Deep, wide-ranging resources: “The heart of the Architecture Studies Library is the collection,” says Operations Supervisor Steve Baskin. Books covering every aspect of architecture, design, landscaping and related subjects — plus rare volumes, videos, documentaries and more.