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"Hot, hot, hot," says architectural ace Winka Dubbeldam, looking for shade on a sweltering fall day in downtown Manhattan. She's walking from the SoHo office of her firm, Archi-Tectonics, to the site of 33 Vestry, a luxury Tribeca condo she designed with panels of translucent stone that make it glow from the inside out. Halfway there, the slender, six-foot-tall, Dutch-born architect ducks under some convenient scaffolding near another of her eye-popping local landmarks—the Greenwich Street Project, an 11-story building with a glass façade that cascades to the street like a cooling waterfall.

After arriving in New York in 1990 to attend Columbia, Dubbeldam swiftly took up stints with a who's who of New York architecture—Steven Holl, Bernard Tschumi, and Peter Eisenman—a career phase she likens to "commando training." Today she is a leading light among a new generation of digitally driven practitioners who came of age in an era of flowcharts and 3-D modeling software. "We're not into stylistic things," she says, "but deriving form from performance." The culmination of this heady approach—which shifts the traditional emphasis of architecture from form to process—is seen in the emerging Unknot Tower in Philadelphia, a breathtaking triangular glass building (luxury downtown hotel combined with apartments and retail) that folds in on itself.

Dubbeldam's ambitious Unknot Tower in Philadelphia, to be completed in 2010. (Photo: Archi-Tectonics

Dubbeldam can talk "generative cores" one moment and then wax poetic about her treasured 1976 AMC Pacer (which expired last year). "I'm one of those girls who loves cars," she admits. It's true that her working process might be closer to automotive or industrial design, but that doesn't translate into cold or aloof. She's just taken on perhaps her biggest challenge yet: designing her parents' house in Vreden, Germany. At first, her brother protested against her characteristically radical design. But Dubbeldam has a disarming knack for making people see the world in new ways, and her brother is now considering commissioning a house of his own.

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