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The 14 Stories Behind the 2016 Building of the Year Award Winners

Last week, ArchDaily unveiled the 14 winners of this year’s Building of the Year award. Selected by ArchDaily readers from a pool of over 3,000 candidates, these 14 projects represent the best designs published by ArchDaily in the past year, as determined by an unbiased network of 55,000 voters who took part - each of them a judge in one of the world's most democratic architecture awards.

Representing a diverse field of architects, locations and project types, each design has a very different story about how it came into being, how its design responds to its context, how it fits into an architect's oeuvre, or what it says about the direction which architecture is traveling in. But despite the many different types of story represented, each of the stories behind the Building of the Year winners is a fascinating architectural tale. Here are those 14 stories.

Winners of the 2016 Building of the Year Awards

After two weeks of nominations and voting, we are pleased to present the winners of the 2016 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards. As a peer-based, crowdsourced architecture award, the results shown here represent the collective intelligence of 55,000 voters, filtering the best architecture from over 3,000 projects featured on ArchDaily during the past year.

As is so often the case with the Building of the Year award, the list of winners represents great diversity. It features two Pritzker Prize winners, Renzo Piano and Herzog & de Meuron (the first practice to ever receive two Building of the Year awards in the same year), but also small, young practices such as Tim Greatrex and Elisabete de Oliveira Saldanha. The buildings which garnered these prizes also range in effect: from the tremendous poise demonstrated by projects such as NAP Architects' Ribbon Chapel and MAD's Harbin Opera House to the rustic charms of Terra e Tuma Arquitetos' Vila Matilde House or Sharon Davis Design's Partners In Health Dormitory.

By publishing them on ArchDaily, these exemplary buildings have helped us to impart inspiration and knowledge to architects around the world, furthering our mission. So to everyone who participated by either nominating or voting for a shortlisted project, thank you for being a part of this amazing process, where the voices of architects from all over the world unite to form one strong, intelligent, forward-thinking message.

And of course, congratulations to all the winners!

The Architectural Review Announces Winners of the 2015 AR Emerging Architecture Awards

The Architectural Review have selected the winners of the 2015 AR Emerging Architecture Awards, billed as “the world's most popular and prestigious prize for up-and-coming architects, giving emerging practices invaluable impetus on their trajectory to wider recognition and success.” Previous award winners include Sou Fujimoto, Thomas Heatherwick, Sean Godsell, Jurgen Mayer H. and Li Xiaodong.

The award is given to completed projects, with entries consisting of buildings, interiors, landscaping, refurbishment, urban projects, temporary installations, furniture and product design. For its 17th year, the jury was comprised of architects Odile Decq, David Adjaye and Sir Peter Cook, and together they searched for what they referred to as the most “resistant” design.

Read on to see this year’s Emerging Architecture Award winners and a video with the jury on the selection process.

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Hiroshi Nakamura Describes the Inspiration Behind the Ribbon Chapel in This Stunning Video

Hiroshi Nakamura, architect of the Ribbon Chapel in Japan, describes the design ideology and his personal favorite elements of the project in this stunning new video by Matthew Allard ACS. Shooting the chapel at various times during the day, its changing characteristics are captured in the movement of the light and camera, the twisting concrete forms seeming to dance.

Video: Hiroshi Nakamura’s Ribbon Chapel

The latest video by French architect and filmmaker Vincent Hecht visits Hiroshi Nakamura’s Ribbon Chapel in Onomichi, Japan. Built in 2013, the 80 square meter wedding chapel features two spiraling stairways that wrap around the building, connecting at the top to form a viewpoint. Watch the video above for a closer look at the stunning chapel.