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Happy Holidays from the Architects (2016 Edition)

'Tis the season for offices from around the world to send us a bit of holiday cheer! See our favorites below (or check out our reader-submitted cards).

Here’s to a wonderful, architecture-filled 2017!

Happy Holidays from the ArchDaily team!

Best Submissions to 2016 Architecture Holiday Card Challenge

Architects and students of architecture stereotypically never stop making, and their creative talents continue to flow irrespective of the holiday season. Our annual challenge is an unashamed way to channel the inventiveness, originality and artistry of our readers from around the world into that most humble of gifts: the holiday card. Out of the 200 submissions, these are 43 of our favorites.  

Featured gif by Rebecca Lou

RAAAF and Atelier de Lyon Reveal a Monumental Tribute to the Dutch Delta Works in Waterloopbos

Amsterdam-based Rietveld-Architecture-Art-Affordances (RAAAF) and Atelier de Lyon have revealed designs to reimagine one of The Netherland's monumental "tribute[s] to the majesty, and seemingly indestructible power, of the Dutch Delta Works." The works themselves—a network of dams, sluices, locks, dykes, levees and storm surge barriers in South Holland—have collectively been described as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. Deltawerk 1:1 is an intervention examining the practice of the preservation of cultural heritage by inserting a new structure within Waterloopbos, the former Dutch Hydrodynamics Laboratory.

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355 Nominees Announced for 2017 EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies Van der Rohe Award

The European Commission and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe has announced the 355 projects from 36 countries which have been nominated for the 2017 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award. Among the countries included, France and Spain are represented the most among the selected projects, with each country featuring 28 times. Meanwhile, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine appear in the prize for the first time, with Georgia offering a commendable 7 listed projects.

Among the building types included on the list, as in the 2015 Prize housing and cultural buildings dominated. However, the 2017 Prize sees an increase in the number of educational buildings and mixed use buildings compared to two years ago.

The European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award was established in 1987 and is awarded every two years, with the winner receiving a €60,000 prize. Previous winners have included the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre in Reykjavik, designed by the Danish architectural firm Henning Larsen in collaboration with the Islandic practice Batteríið and the artist Olafur Elíasson, and the Neues Museum in Berlin, designed by David Chipperfield Architects and Julian Harrap. The winner in 2015 was the Philharmonic Hall Szczecin in Poland by Barozzi / Veiga.

The list will be narrowed to a shortlist of 40 projects in late January, with the winner announced in April 2017. In addition to the main prize, the Fundació Mies van der Rohe is once again running a special mention award for emerging architects, with winners of this award receiving a €20,000 prize.

Read on for the full list of 355 selected projects.

Build Your Own Subway System with This New Game

In New York City, as in many cities worldwide, residents rely on the subway system to get around. But despite its importance, there are still plenty of locations throughout the city so difficult to get to, it’ll leave you cursing, “Who designed this thing anyway!?”

Now thanks to a new game from engineer Jason Wright, you have a chance to correct the design flaws of the current system – virtually, anyway.

Inside the Murphy House, RIBA's 2016 House of the Year

Last week, Richard Murphy Architects‘Murphy House’ in Edinburgh was named the Royal Institute of British Architects’ 2016 RIBA House of the Year. Built into a hillside lot, the unusual site presented the architects with the opportunity to play, loading the house with an assortment of clever architectural details and mechanics, including a hidden bath in the master bedroom, folding walls, sliding bookshelf ladders and operable clerestory panels.

To capture all these moving parts in their full effect, the architect himself created a video walkthrough of the house. Check it out below.

Call for ArchDaily Interns: Spring 2017

UPDATE: Deadline extended to Wednesday, December 21st at 12:00 PM EST!
is looking for a motivated and highly-skilled architecture-lover to join our team of interns for 2017! An ArchDaily Content internship provides a unique opportunity to learn about our site and write engaging, witty and insightful posts.

Interested? Then check out the requirements below.

Land Lines: Trace an Infinite Path Around the Planet Using Maps

Land Lines, a new Chrome Experiment exploiting the satellite image data collated by Google Maps, allows anyone—cartographic aficionado or otherwise—to marvel at the contours of the world through gestures. Intelligently designed to detect dominant visual lines from a dataset of thousands of images, cut down from over 50,000 by using a combination of OpenCV Structured Forests and ImageJ’s Ridge Detection, users can simply "draw" or "drag" on a mobile browser or on a desktop to "create an infinite line of connected rivers, highways and coastlines."

SANAA's Zollverein School of Management and Design Photographed by Laurian Ghinitoiu

SANAA's Zollverein School of Management and Design in Essen, Germany, is a perfect 35 meter-cube. The building's dominant presence, which is particularly striking amid its suburban context, extends to the interior spaces. The architects felt "that exceptional ceiling heights were appropriate for the educational spaces, particularly for the studio level that occupies an entire slab of the structure." Indeed, this production floor is "an unusually lofty and fully flexible space," enclosed only by the external structural walls. Photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has visited the building, which was completed in 2010, to capture a fresh view on this seminal project.

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Nikola Olic's Collapsed and Dimensionless Façades

Nikola Olic, an architectural photographer based in Dallas, Texas, has a thematic focus on capturing and reimagining buildings and sculptural objects in "dimensionless and disorienting ways." His studies, which often isolate views of building façades, frame architectural surfaces in order for them to appear to collapse into two dimensions. "This transience," he argues, "can be suspended by a camera shutter for a fraction of a second." In this second series shared with ArchDaily, Olic presents a collection of photographs taken in Barcelona, Dallas, New York City and Los Angeles.

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Experience the Sir John Soane's Museum, Virtually

The Sir John Soane’s Museum is often cited as a seminal inspiration for architects of all generations. Located in London's Lincoln's Inn Fields, the house—designed by Soane (born in 1753), architect of the Bank of England—is a remarkable biographical bricolage of unique spaces, objects and ideas. Kept exactly as it was at the time of Soane's death in 1837, the museum is packed with paintings, sculpture, furniture and drawings – all curated and composed by the architect himself to "enhance their poetic qualities."

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Schmidt Hammer Lassen Design New Shanghai Library

With nearly 25 million inhabitants the Chinese city of Shanghai is currently the most populous city in the world and, in addition, has a central library system that dates back to the mid 19th Century. A new city library, designed by Danish practice Schmidt Hammer Lassen and won following a two-stage international competition, will provide 110,000 square meters of space in the Pudong District and adjacent to Century Park – the largest green space in the city.

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Director of London's Architectural Association, Brett Steele, to Become UCLA Dean

Brett Steele, Director of London's Architectural Association (AA) since 2005, has announced that he will become Dean of UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture in August 2017. Although American-born, Steele has since become a naturalized British citizen. He studied at the AA, the University of Oregon, and the San Francisco Art Institute respectively, before working as a Project Architect at Zaha Hadid Architects in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

See the Best Architecture of 2016

As 2016 comes to a close, we want to extend our sincerest thanks for your continued support during this past year; it has been our most inspiring and successful yet as we continue to connect to architects all over the world.

On behalf of the entire ArchDaily team, we are very excited to share a special feature – 2016’s most visited projects and articles. This selection features the most relevant and noteworthy content created and shared over the past 12 months.

Who Should Win the 2017 Pritzker Prize?

The end of 2016 is nearly upon us, and with the start of 2017 comes speculation about who will be the next Pritzker Prize winner. Will the jury honor an influential member of the "old guard," as they did in 2015 when they bestowed the award upon the late Frei Otto? Or will they recognize a young architect who is redefining the profession, as they did when they selected Alejandro Aravena earlier this year? Will they reward virtuoso spatial design, or will they once again acknowledge the role of social impact, as they did in recognizing Aravena and Shigeru Ban in 2014? Will the award go to an individual or to two or more architects working together, as it did in 2010 when SANAA scooped the prize?

We want to hear from our readers – not just about who probably will win the prize, but about who should win the prize, and why. Read on to cast your vote in our poll, and let us know in the comments whose name you'd like to hear announced in 2017.

RIBA to Present Seminal Show on Mies van der Rohe's Unrealized "Mansion House Tower"

Next year the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) will open a seminal new exhibition: Mies van der Rohe & James Stirling: Circling the Square. The show will examine two iconic schemes proposed for the same site in the City of London: Mies van der Rohe’s unrealised Mansion House Square project (developed by Lord Peter Palumbo) and its built successor, James Stirling Michael Wilford & Associates’ No.1 Poultry.

Project of the Month: Tangshan Organic Farm

The design of industrial architecture presents a considerable challenge, since certain factors such as the industrial workflow and the conditions for the workers and machinery provide the guidelines for the development of the project. However, in many cases, industrial projects are designed without further exploration in terms of materials or construction systems, aiming simply to comply with regulations.

This month we want to highlight the Organic Farm in Tangshan by Chinese firm ARCHSTUDIO, a project in which an interesting structural and conceptual exploration results in a new industrial architectural intention, and which also generates new public spaces to promote a relationship with the nearby community through the construction.

Read on for our interview with ARCHSTUDIO about this Organic Farm.

Finishing Touches Applied to Foster + Partners' Apple Campus 2

Following an unofficial update in August 2016, Apple's Campus 2 is entering the final stages of construction. A new drone video, captured by aerial videographer Matthew Roberts earlier this month, shows the 'Research and Development' facility nearing full completion and capped by a vast roof plant, the 'tantau roof' on the security kiosk in place, and an epic effort in landscaping taking place both within the "spaceship's" courtyard and across the company's enormous property. Only one crane now remains on site and the solar installations appear to be around 60% complete, suggesting that the scheduled 2017 move-in date remains on track.

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