Anmahian Winton Architects designed this structure, which opened in 2008 and is exactly what its name implies: a boathouse beside the Charles.

In 2009, the design won the Boston Society of Architects' Harleston Parker Medal, which honors what its backers call "the single most beautiful building or other structure" built in the Boston area during the previous 10 years.

Bauhaus giant Walter Gropius' Architects Collaborative designed this graduate-student complex in the late 1940s.

The factory-like, brutally functional buildings were a milestone in modern architecture in the United States, including the distinction of being the first modern buildings on Harvard's campus.

"Harvard Decides to 'Build Modern'"—that was the headline in the October 25, 1948 New York Times, complete with the quotation marks around "Build Modern."

One of Le Corbusier's top proteges was Josep Sert, who ran Harvard's architecture and design faculty for much of the mid-1900s.

Sert’s Science Center design was a deliberately modernist departure from all the more classical, Georgian architecture at the surrounding university.

It went up in the early 1970s.

Harvard's visual arts center is the only completed project in North America from French architect Le Corbusier (he collaborated with Chilean architect Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente).

The curved building opened in 1963.

Steven Holl Architects designed this 350-bed, 196,000-square-foot dormitory at the turn of the century with the idea of fostering interaction in mind.

Hence its porous, sponge-like appearance and setup, including some 6,000 open-able windows.

Finnish architect Alvar Aalto described this six-story M.I.T. dorm that he designed as a mix between a ski lodge and a ship.

It went up in the late 1940s.

Eero Saarinen designed this non-denominational chapel, which the university dedicated in 1955.

It is 30 feet high and 50 feet in diameter, and features a striking skylight over a white marble altar.

This 121,037-square-foot wing of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts opened in late 2010. Norman Foster's London firm designed it in collaboration with CBT Architects of Boston.

Critic Ada Louise Huxtable described it as a "discreet addition" to Guy Lowell's original Beaux Arts building, which went up almost exactly a century before.

This 720,000-square-foot academic hub is one of the region's most famous buildings, period.

The Frank Gehry-designed structure was completed in 2004 to pretty much universal acclaim.

Here was the Globe's Robert Campbell at the time: "Everything looks improvised, as if thrown up at the last moment. That's the point. The Stata's appearance is a metaphor for the freedom, daring, and creativity of the research that's supposed to occur inside it."

The tower formerly known as the John Hancock is New England’s tallest building at 790 feet, a distinction it has held since construction of the Henry Cobb-designed spire wrapped in 1976.

Boston's City Hall has been an architectural punching bag since its completion in 1968 (it often makes lists of "ugliest buildings").

Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles, then professors at Columbia, won an international competition to design the civic hub and pivoted from more traditional fare as well as from sleek, glassiness to a brutalist design that still perplexes the masses some 50 years on.

The museum itself dates from 1936, but this striking iteration opened in 2006. Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed it.

It, too, took home the Harleston Parker Medal from the Boston Society of Architects.