While the holidays bring with them a well-earned break for most architects, the creativity doesn't stop when the studio doors close. From gifts to greetings, designers bring their talents to the full range of holiday trappings - and we're here to share. This annual challenge, now in its fourth year, is our way of celebrating the inventiveness, originality, and artistry of ArchDaily readers from around the world. Below, our 50+ favorites from our readers: 

In a year packed with headlines, you’d be forgiven for occasionally letting them pass you by. But even within the mass of project proposals, awards, competitions, and events, a few trends emerged in 2018 - trends that both tell us about the year past and suggest where things might be heading. These trends, below:

It's time to get into the Holiday Spirit! As we've done for the past few years, we're seeking holiday cards with an architectural spin to feature on ArchDaily. We expect abundant puns and festively decorated classic buildings. :)

“A drawing should be a key to the understanding of architecture – what is there to like or dislike, where do architects’ ideas come from, how do these ideas make it to paper, and what is important in this process.” - Sergei Tchoban

For the past month the Russian-German architect, artist, and collector Sergei Tchoban has been the focus of the exhibition, Sergei Tchoban: Drawing Buildings/Building Drawings, bringing together fifty of the architect’s large-scale urban fantasy drawings. These drawings, while intriguing for their technical and artistic value, also reflect Tchoban's deeply personal contemplations about the past, present, and future of his favorite cities - Saint Petersburg, Rome, Amsterdam, Venice, Berlin, New York – along with in-depth documentation of five realized projects (two museums, two exhibition pavilions, and a theater stage design.)

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The holiday season may be one of joy, but there's always a little panic involved as well. You want to treat your loved ones to a gift they'll treasure and appreciate, but where to start?

Readers, ArchDaily has you covered. This year we've separated our choices in sections to help you find that perfect gift for the picky (budding) architect in your life. Our choices - and links to where you can find them - after the break: 

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Following an extensive day of presentations, panels, critiques, and talks The World Architecture Festival (WAF) has announced the Day 1 category winners in their 2018 programming. Winners are recognized in over 35 categories over the first two days of the conference, which culminates with the announcement of the World Building of the Year 2018 on the third and final day of the conference.

While still early days, the world’s largest architectural award program, the WAF Awards is poised for its biggest year yet, with a total of 535 shortlisted projects from 57 countries across the world.

Danish architecture firm ADEPT has been announced the winner of a competition to redevelop Berlin's Marinehaus as part of the city's Stadtmuseum group. This iteration of the competition was launched in 2018 (following a similar competition ten years ago) and will rehabilitate the Marinehaus for public use after nearly 20 years of closure.

At IE School of Architecture and Design, we know that the world of work is changing so fast that we cannot always keep up. Industry disruptors, such as emerging technologies, are unsettling the setup of the traditional office. Workforce demands, the ongoing talent war, and the threat of job replacement by AI all contribute to a workforce under tremendous pressure, creating new dynamics at work.

Alain de Botton’s Living Architecture project - a joyful, democratically-minded concept to share quality architecture in the UK - was borne out of personal crisis. The Swiss-born philosopher and author gained fame in both popular and architectural circles following the release of his book, "The Architecture of Happiness."

The book was immediately successful (movie buffs may recall its brief cameo in the 2009 film 500 Days of Summer), but the response unsettled Botton. “...However pleasing it is two write a book about an issue one feels passionately about," he explained to Assemble Papers, "the truth is that - a few exceptions aside - books don’t change anything. I realized that if I cared so much about architecture, writing was a coward’s way out; the real challenge was to build.”

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Erieta Attali has devoted two decades to exploring the relationship between architecture and the landscape at the edges of the world. Attali’s photography interrogates how extreme conditions and demanding terrains provoke humankind to re-orient and center itself through architectural responses. Her unrelenting and highly physical expedition has seen her traverse four continents, working in isolated and remote terrains from Iceland to the Indian Ocean.

To rank architects, or to even pretend that any list or selection would be exhaustive and/or apply to the individual tastes of every architecture lover, seems, on the surface, a pointless task. However, as we move away from looking for inspiration from merely the great masters or the handful of contemporary firms studied in academic programs, it is important to shine a light on the works that we, as ArchDaily editors, have found particularly valuable. Of the thousands of architects whose projects have been selected to be published on our site, we occasionally notice firms whose work stands out. Whether we’re drawn to their innovative approach to practice, the role they play in contributing to their local communities, or their generosity, we are eager to display their work as an example, so that others may be inspired to challenge the status quo.

Manhattan is known for its iconic skyline, brimming with skyscrapers, high rises, and some of the most impressive architecture in the world. But it wasn’t always that way; it took hundreds of years for New York City to become the structurally diverse, world-famous city that it is today.

This was originally posted on October 17, 2017.

When it's time to dress up for Halloween, Carnival or theme parties, people often choose costumes that resonate with their interests. This is especially true for architects, who are particularly well-suited to designing and building head-turning outfits. For students and young architects, the yearning to construct (and destruct) stems from the will to create elaborate headpieces and ingenious appendages.

Videos

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) have announced Foster + Partner's Bloomberg HQ as the winner of the 2018 Stirling Prize. Seen as the UK's most prestigious architecture award, this award is given to the building " that has made the biggest contribution to the evolution of architecture in a given year." Selected from a list of six projects, the design highlights the collaboration between a civic-minded client and architect, as well as addressing the public realm.

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Created by the Union International des Architects (UIA) in 2005, World Architecture Day is celebrated on the first Monday of October, aiming to highlight and remind the world of the architecture's collective responsibility in designing the world's future cities and settlements. To celebrate, ArchDaily's editors have chosen stories from the year so far that have interested, excited, or inspired them. Read on to see the stories.

As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage, we present the completed Kosovo Pavilion. Below, curator Eliza Hoxha describes the exhibition in her own words.

The ‘90s in Kosovo under the Milošević regime are known as times of repression, a time when ethnic Albanians were expelled from all state-run institutions and thereby removed from public life. Funded by the 3 percent income tax mainly from Albanian Diaspora, Albanians created a parallel system of education, culture and healthcare in their private houses, which citizens offered for free. These private houses provided space for public life for almost ten years in Pristina, the capital and other cities in Kosovo. In the ‘90s, life that the city center provided for everyone ended for Albanians, and all activity was dislocated to the periphery. The entire Albanian community shrank into private houses. The house became a school, a restaurant, a promotional activity space, an office, an art gallery, a hospital and a home at the same time.

The results of DesignIntelligence's annual ranking of architecture schools in the USA are now being determined with a change in the survey question previously used to determine rankings. This year, instead of being asked "Which programs in the United States are best preparing students for a future in the profession?", architecture and interior design professionals responded to two new questions: "What schools do you most admire for a combination of faculty, programs, culture, and student preparation for the profession?" and "From which schools have you hired the greatest number of (undergraduate or graduate) students in the last five years?".