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According to the global affairs magazine Monocle, Britain's cultural cache is at an all-time high.

The magazine's latest annual Soft Power Survey (which measures the "Soft Power" of a country, or "the ways in which a nation can shape the world without relying on financial muscle and overwhelming force") placed the UK as the world's greatest cultural influencer, dethroning the US for the first time.

The magazine cites the UK's action-packed year, which included the Queen's Jubilee, the success of pop-culture phenomena (like Adele and James Bond), and the Summer Olympic Games, as the catalyst which put them on top.

But let's not underestimate the role that architecture has played as a symbol of Britain's cultural import. Despite financial difficulties (which have put London's burgeoning skyline in doubt), the year was nevertheless a good one for Britain's architecture and architects - Renzo Piano's controversial Shard hogged the spotlight in London's Olympic coverage; Dame Zaha Hadid, Glamour's Woman of the Year, has been non-stop in the media thanks to her Aquatics Centre and Galaxy Soho; and, to top it off, British megafirm Foster + Partners will soon be responsible for many of New York's latest skyscrapers. Talk about the Empire striking back.

Find out who else made the list of most influential countries, after the break...

From October 22-26, Cannon Design will host a prominent and diverse group of speakers to present at the Chicago firm’s 11th Annual Environmental Awareness Week.

"Great architects build structures that can make us feel enclosed, liberated or suspended. They lead us through space, make us slow down, speed up or stop to contemplate. Great writers, in devising their literary structures, do exactly the same." A recent post by Matteo Pericoli of The New York Times describes what happens when writers, students in Pericoli's creative writing course, team up with architects in order to "physically build the architecture of a text." The resulting models are physical representations of the emotions, relationships, and narrative-styles of stories by authors as varied as David Foster Wallace, Ayn Rand, and Virginia Woolf. Check out all the models, and their accompanying descriptions, at the NYT.

Catherine Opie has photographed people and architecture in and around Los Angeles, California for over twenty-five years. She has successfully captured the interplay between architecture and urban life by photographing the subcultures and castaways of Los Angeles, from the undersides of freeways to lonely Beverly Hills mansions. These works create a portrait of Los Angeles as a singular built environment.