Zaha Hadid, Di Zhang, Carme Pinos, Jeanne Gang, Carla Juaçaba, Bia Lessa, Elisabete de Oliveira Saldanha, Sandra Barclay, Kazuyo Sejima, Sharon Davis, Elisa Burnazzi,Tatiana Bilbao, Jô Vasconcellos, Odile Decq, María Victoria Besonías, Lina Bo Bardi. 

While there is still a lot of progress that needs to be made to achieve gender equality within the profession, women are behind some of the most recognizable and inspiring projects. To honor their work, and in light of International Women's Day, we present 15 outstanding projects designed by female architects.

The selection features work by the only two women to have been awarded the Pritzker Prize – Zaha Hadid and Kazuyo Sejima – as well as projects designed by Sharon Davis and Elisabete de Oliveira Saldanha, who both won Building of the Year 2016 awards. All fifteen projects represent the potential of each architect and can serve as inspiration for everyone.

View all of the projects after the break. 

Complementing the many websites that already provide people for renders, PimpMyDrawing is a growing online database of vector drawings of people. The site was started by three recent graduates of architecture school. After realizing the amount of vector drawings that they had produced during their academic career, they decided to share them for free.

Selected from a pool of over 220 entries, the winners of the second edition of the EeStairs Design Competition have been announced. The competition challenged entrants to trace the evolution of the staircase, designing a staircase to inspire a workspace, or a balustrade that was the perfect balance of functionality and style.

The A’ Design Awards are held to honor excellent designs from all countries in disciplines across the design industry. Entries to the A' Design Competition are peer-reviewed and anonymously judged by an influential jury panel of leading academics, prominent press members and experienced professionals. The A' Design Award is an opportunity for distinction, eminence, attention and international recognition for the A’ Design Award Laureates.

Fact 47: Eero Saarinen designed the Dulles international airport in Virginia. The original Dulles terminal is unique because its massive shapely concrete pillars along the main facade and its wing like roof. Both of which express the soaring quality of flight. #dulles #architect #architecture #design #designer #architectureporn #architectureschool #architecturelovers #airport

A video posted by Doug Patt (@dougpatt) on Feb 14, 2016 at 10:46pm PST

Covering everything from the definition of a volute to a look at Eero Saarinen’s Dulles international airport, Doug Patt’s “How to Architect” videos offer 15 second glimpses into the world of architecture. Posted on his Instagram account daily, each video explores one fact related to architecture. At the end of each week, the facts are compiled into a longer video on YouTube.

Check out a selection of videos after the break.  

One of many companies currently supporting the growing demand for Virtual Reality (VR), Sketchfab, known for being a “Youtube for 3D Models”, has added features to their website, allowing users to exhibit their work in VR. In this recent post, company CEO and co-founder Alban discusses the likelihood of a Virtual Reality renaissance in 2016. Comparing the platform to its predecessors in digital media, audio and video, he notes that the final steps for any new form of media are: easy to use, working technology; affordable interfaces; and user generated content, prefacing that 2016 may be the year that VR reaches this final step.

Concrete is one of the most widely innovated and improved upon building technologies in the world. With applications in both pre-fabrication and continuous pouring, the material has become a hot-bed for applications in fabrication techniques, from incredible, monolithic forms, to 3D-printing.

But behind all of the successes, there have been countless failures, including a well-intended innovation by famous American inventor Thomas Edison. Filed on August 13, 1908, Edison’s ill-fated patent was a home that could be built with a single pour of concrete, reports Slate. Although Thomas Edison had previous ventures in concrete, including a cement plant in Stewartsville, New Jersey, as well as several patented improvements in the cement-making process, his venture into concrete construction may have just been too ambitious.

Videos

Hardboard is a wooden fiberboard that is produced by compression at high temperatures, making a smooth and uniform surface. It is known for being highly flexible and very resistant to humidity. In spite of these qualities, the product has been pigeonholed for specific uses -- rear panels, bases, packaging -- losing visibility and importance in the world of architecture and design.

Hoping to change how the material is viewed by designers and architects, Arauco invited The Andes House to develop an attractive and innovative solution that would allow the product's advantages to really stand out. With experience designing products using very basic raw materials such as wicker and pine, the team at The Andes House created Ensamble, the project that we're presenting to you now.

+ 16

This series of images captures Oscar Niemeyer’s Cathedral of Brasília through the lens of Argentine architect and photographer Gonzalo Viramonte.

A graduate of Argentina’s National University of Córdoba, Viramonte started photographing landscapes and small towns while traveling by bicycle through his country. Today, he is dedicated to architectural photography, and manages a Flickr account where you can see all of his work.

+ 31

February 28th is the deadline for the A’ Design Award & Competition, an international design accolade that reaches millions of design oriented readers, brands, designers, architects and developers from countries around the world. This is the design award that runs and manages the World Design Rankings, and last year there were winners from 83 countries in 88 design categories that were judged by a 70-person grand jury panel.

Gregory Kloehn, an artist, construction contractor, and plumber based in Oakland, California, has created miniature homes for the homeless in his community. Inspired by a book he compiled of pictures of the structures that homeless people had constructed on the streets, Kloehn used his creative skills to build them miniature homes. He told NationSwell, “I really just ripped a page out of the homeless peoples’ book, their own game plan.” His first completed home was given to a couple he had become friendly with while photographing for his book. The home came complete with a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

Photo of the Day: Ghadames, Libya http://t.co/MpRCAemGuy #pod #photography

— National Geographic (@NatGeo) March 27, 2013

Since time immemorial, and more recently, humans have wondered what the world looks like from above. This fascination has historically manifested in the plan drawing and aerial photography. In this vein, and using a motorized paraglider, National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz has captured a stunning bird’s-eye view of the ancient city of Ghadames, in Libya.

A’ Design Award has once again launched its call for entries for Architectural Projects, Interior Design Work, Furniture Designs, Innovative Lighting Products and Building Materials. Everything related to architecture and design, including but not limited to new products, real estate, construction projects and even machinery can be submitted for awards consideration.

Sweden based visual artist, Anastasia Savinova, has created a series of collages that seek to capture the spirit of cities. Titled “Genius Loci,” her collages form a big house that is composed of many buildings characteristic of each city, visualizing the way of life, the atmosphere, and the feeling of each place. Photographs of architecture are the foundational components of her art work, representing the feeling as a whole.

+ 9

Since 2010, the Danish architects from Schønherr have been developing a series of large-scale urban interventions for the Aarhus Festival, the largest cultural festival in Denmark. These temporary projects have transformed the streets and parks into extraordinary public spaces, changing the natural topography of the city to attract citizens and bring them together.

We present their last four projects: "The Forest" (2010), "The City Park" (2012), "The Plaza" (2014) and "Bishops Square" (to be completed this 2016).

+ 44

Every year the international A’ Design Award and Competition announces an arts, architecture and design ranking of countries based on the number of A’ Design Awards won by each country over the last six years. The A’ Design Award recognizes prominent designers and architects as well as architecture offices and businesses from countries around the world, with the 2015 awards featuring winners from 83 different nations.

"What if everyone’s thoughts hovered above their head?"
"What if buildings were sentient beings that could communicate thoughts and memories?"
"What if we let children design their own playgrounds?"

Created by designer Chanel Dehond from Manhattan-based design studio ICRAVE, IDEAS FOR THE BRAVE (IFTB) is a submission-based, open source platform for brainstorming. IFTB is open to the public, with the international design community as its target demographic.

Chilean architecture, having long stood in the shadow of more established design traditions in Europe and North America, has been catapulted to the forefront of global attention with the news that architect Alejandro Aravena has been named the 41st Pritzker Prize Laureate – the first Chilean to receive the award. He is also the director of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, which focuses on the role of architects in improving the living conditions of people across the globe, especially in cases where scarce resources and the “inertia of reality” stand in the way of progress.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has announced the names of the 158 finalists in the Knight Cities Challenge. The nation wide call was for innovative ideas to make the 26 communities where the Knight Foundation invests more social and vibrant places to live. More than 4,500 entries were submitted proposing a range of ideas from opening the world’s largest African American history museum in Detroit to a card game that encourages residents of Charlotte to visit new neighborhoods. The winners, who will split a prize of $5 million, will be announced in the spring of 2016.

We believe good projects should be able to express and explain themselves. Architectural representation plays a fundamental role in how a project is perceived by the audience, which is why today ArchDaily is recognizing the most outstanding, original and self explanatory drawings of the year.

The selected drawings cover the diverse range of different techniques used in architectural representation today, from hand drawing images to perfectly detailed axonometrics and animated GIFs - but one thing they all have in common is the deep insights they provide into the appearance, construction or concept of the buildings they represent.

About twenty years after the last documentary on Kevin Roche was released, London-based film company Wavelength Pictures will produce an updated look at the life and work of the Pritzker Prize-winning architect, with a section of the film focusing on his projects in Columbus, Indiana, reports local paper The Republic. Wavelength Pictures plans to come to Columbus in 2016, filming buildings that Roche designed and conducting interviews.

Artist Maycon Prasniewski has developed a series of illustrated posters featuring historic and cultural sites in Curitiba, Brazil. Important buildings in the city, such as the Oscar Niemeyer museum, the Wire Opera House, the Free University of the Environment (Unilivre), and the Botanical Garden are represented alongside other landmarks.

+ 9

View the illustrations after the break. 

Happy New Year from ArchDaily to our readers from around the globe! We had a great 2015 and we couldn’t have done it without your support. We can’t wait to see what 2016 will bring. In the meantime, check out some of our most popular projects, stories and highlights of 2015, after the break.

The six teams selected to participate in the second phase of design concept development for the New Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Center at Tel Aviv University (TAU) met representatives of the school and KB STRELKA in Tel Aviv, where a series of events were held.