THE BEST DESIGN OF 1993

1 James Ingo Freed: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It's hard to imagine a more difficult architectural commission: design a museum devoted to the Holocaust that is also a fitting memorial to its victims -- and make it beautiful and decorous, and put it on the Mall in Washington, which has heretofore been reserved for stone commemorations of American goodness (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln) and American tragedy (Vietnam). And it's hard to imagine a more successful job of it than that managed by architect Freed, a partner of I.M. Pei's. With its exhibits designed by Ralph Appelbaum, Freed's museum is neither a pious, too-easy-to-take abstraction nor a meretriciously Disneyesque Auschwitz-land; rather it is a craftsmanlike, thoughtful and powerfully disturbing hybrid of both, a ghastly but never wholly literal evocation of the camps as well as a sublime contemplation of history (even, with its Speerish neoclassical facade, architectural history) and memory.

2 Frank Gehry: Weisman Art Museum Like Frank Lloyd Wright, Gehry, 64, seems to become fresher and more creative as he ages. This year's masterwork is the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The smallish museum concentrates on 20th century American art, and the exterior can be seen as a tough, gleefully manic (that is, American) work of Cubist sculpture or as a giant brushed-stainless-steel popcorn kernel, or as a wizard's castle in some 23rd century fairy tale. Inside, where huge skylights bathe the galleries in sunlight, the feeling is serene but never static.

3 Davids Killory: Daybreak Grove The proportion of America's homeless population consisting of families with children increased 30% during 1993, according to a report issued last week. Which makes Daybreak Grove, a tiny but splendid attempt in the San Diego exurb of Escondido to give a few impoverished families homes, all the more heartening. The project shows that low-income housing need not be dreary or demeaning: this is a lively and dignified piece of tightly woven architecture. Architects Christine Killory and her partner, Chilean-born Rene Davids, have used as their central idea a traditional Latin American form: each two- and three-bedroom unit is built around a small internal patio, and all 13 are arrayed around a central plaza and playground.

4 Antoine Predock: House In the capricious realm where world-class architectural reputations are created, Predock has had two things going against him: because he practices in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he has been dismissed as a regionalist, and because he is earnestly New Agey in explaining his architecture (elemental earth forces, invisible Native American residues, UFOS and so on), critics and tastemakers have not always granted him his considerable due. But he has consistently produced marvelous, singular work, and the house he just finished in the Dallas suburb of Highland Park is particularly fine. Set on a steep, forested site in a neighborhood of conventionally swanky Texas mansions, the new house is a not-quite-severe collage of limestone, concrete and black steel, simultaneously grave and jazzy. Nor is it simply a multimillion-dollar one-liner: the entrance to the place is one thing (giant, portentous limestone chunks), the inside quite another (vast, airy volumes), and the rear (a huge, mirrorized steel plate) still another. Out back, a 60-ft. ramp projects uselessly and wonderfully up into the sky. With its impeccable detailing and rich, complex plan, the building reinvigorates the idea of the modernist villa.

5 Kent Larson: Louis Kahn's Hurva Synagogue Kahn, one of the 20th century's greatest architects, died in 1974 before the synagogue was built in Jerusalem, and the project died with him. Yet now it exists, virtually, thanks to a stunning act of digital cyber-architecture by architect Larson and computer expert Koji Tsuchiya. They have concocted 20 uncannily realistic ''views'' on a Silicon Graphics workstation. Even the materials are authentic, since Larson digitized photos of the concrete, stone and wood from Kahn's Center for British Art at Yale and used them to ''build'' the synagogue.

6 Douglas Green: ETA Furniture ETA stands for ''easy to assemble,'' and it is, since Green, a Maine-based designer-craftsman, has conceived, refined and started manufacturing the Arts and Craftsy pieces himself. They come in kits and are made of solid cherrywood, not veneer. The component timbers are precisely slotted and notched to fit without nails, screws or glue. In each instance, the final component -- for instance, the top of the dining table -- acts as a keystone to hold the item together. It's the '90s ideal: classic, ingenious, unpretentious, real.

7 James Stewart Polshek: Ed Sullivan Theater Renovation If you're paying one person $42 million to host America's best late-night talk show, why skimp on the studio? Within weeks of announcing David Letterman's arrival early this year, CBS bought the old vaudeville theater, thus committing itself to a crazy, six-month renovation schedule. Polshek, an unerring and seriously underrated architect, not only rewired and replumbed the place and removed the cat-size rats and the running stream from the basement, but he also peeled away 57-year-old walls to discover the theater's original four-story Neo-Gothic apses on either side of the stage and, throughout the theater, a vast amount of decorative plasterwork, 40% of which ! needed replacing. In addition, a modern TV infrastructure had to be implanted without seriously disturbing any of the splendid 1927 shell. For all that, the total cost was still probably less than Letterman earns in a year.

8 Spencer Associates: Coldwater Ridge Visitor Services Center Leave it to Americans to take a disaster that killed 57 people just 13 years ago and turn it into an official federal tourist trap. Fortunately, this center in the blast-zone heart of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument nicely avoids both government-issue banality and hokey log-cabin regionalism. Spencer Associates, based in Palo Alto, California, has created a spectacular glass-covered grand hall, from which one can gawk at acres of ash, lava beds, charred cedar stumps and, eight miles away, the still active volcano.

9 Massimo Morozzi: Alessi Bottle Opener The Italian company Alessi has produced a witty kitchen bibelot from nearly every item of houseware. Now it has got around to the lowly bottle opener. Perhaps inspired by a mental picture of millions of infantilized men sucking on beer bottles as they watch football (or soccer) on TV, Morozzi used the baby rattle as a model, producing a jumbo-size plastic opener that is both playful and elegant. It comes in black and white and -- yes -- blue and pink.

10 Roz Chast: ''Mad About'' CD Covers Making a pointedly unself-serious attempt to attract new buyers, the classical-record label Deutsche Grammophon commissioned fey, funny cartoonist Chast to paint the covers for their Mad About series of reissues. The result: a charming new brand -- and a possible explanation of why CDs are exactly the size of cartoons.