The international Prix Versailles Committee has announced the recipients of its annual awards celebrating built commercial architecture. The awards were held at the UNESCO World Headquarters, with recipients hailing from 6 regions around the world. Chaired by the Mayor of Versailles François de Mazières, the international jury included architects Manuelle Gautrand, Toyo Ito, Wang Shu, and acclaimed chef Guy Laroche.

The 12 World Titles are awarded in 4 top categories: stores, shopping malls, hotels and restaurants. The winners were selected from a diverse range of 70 regional winners already present in the ceremony.

Check out the gallery of the 12 winners below:

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MVRDV and developer Provast has revealed plans for a two new mixed-use residential towers in The Hague that will add over 500 new apartments to the city’s Central Business District. Located on Grotiusplaats adjacent to the National Library and near the city’s Central Station, the “Grotius Towers” will offer 61,800 square meters of residential and commercial space to service the needs of The Hague’s growing downtown core.

The towers’ design reacts to the typical tower typology found in the Hague by focusing on high-quality details, a subtle facade, a ‘soft’ landing on the street and a ‘crown’ of large outdoor spaces. Inside, a mix of social housing and private accommodations will ensure the buildings are inhabited by a diverse community, while their ground-floor commercial plinths will make the complex a destination for shopping, dining and socializing.

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MVRDV’s public Art Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen has broken ground on the northern edge of Rotterdam’s Museumpark in the heart of the city’s cultural campus. The 15,000-square-meter reflective vessel will store the esteemed collection of over 70,000 art and design objects, adding a new cultural landmark to join the nearby Kunsthal, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Chabot Museum and Sonneveld House.

Officially breaking ground this past Friday, the BREEAM Excellent-planned “Collection Building” will combine restoration facilities, exhibition spaces, offices, logistics, a bar, restaurant, public roof terrace and private collectors facilities alongside a specially commissioned atrium that will allow visitors to experience 90% of the collection, including artworks in storage.

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MVRDV has released new renderings and a flythrough of their competition-winning design for a new cultural center in the city of Zaanstad in the Netherlands. Borrowing architectural motifs from the historic Zaan House, the design flips the traditional form inside out to create a new living room for the city. Inside, the building will become the new home of a film house, a library, a performing and visual arts centre, a pop music centre, a music school, a centre for design and a local radio station.

Check out the video below.

MVRDV and Zhubo Architecture Design have won a competition to design the Xili Sports and Cultural Centre in Shenzhen, China. The new experience center will consist of four distinct volumes housing a theater, a basketball and badminton arena, a multi-function arena and a swimming pool, as it seeks to “transform the lives of the different generations of people living nearby, through offering a more humanistic model for sports and culture.”

BIG, MVRDV, Snøhetta and aMDL have unveiled images of their proposals for the redesign of San Pellegrino flagship factory and bottling plant located at the source of the mineral water in San Pellegrino Terme, Italy.

The competition brief asked architects to renovate and expand the historic home of San Pellegrino, the world’s leading sparkling mineral water company, with a “truly innovative and technologically-advanced design” aimed at integrating into the natural aesthetic of the surrounding terrain, while responding to the iconic identity of the S. Pellegrino brand.

Continue reading to see each proposal along with official descriptions from each firm.

MVRDV has announced plans for Paradise City, a 9,800 square meter entertainment plaza near Incheon Airport in Seoul, South Korea. Designer in partnership with Gansam Architects, the complex will consist of two monolithic forms housing retail and a nightclub, and new public spaces. The connecting element of the project is a giant golden spot at the public square, which the architects hope will become a beacon visible to tourists as they fly into the city.

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In a recent article on Vice (in Dutch) and on his research platform website Failed Architecture, architecture writer Mark Minkjan comments on the phenomenon of architectural renders, arguing that “digital visualizations and hollow sales pitches hide the ugly sides of architecture.” In the article, Minkjan takes MVRDV's proposal for Ravel Plaza in Amsterdam as a “case study” to discuss the misleading quality of the render. This criticism – of renders in general and MVRDV's renders specifically – is a returning point of critique: on ArchDaily in 2013, Tim De Chant begged in an opinion piece “Can We Please Stop Drawing Trees on Top of Skyscrapers?” Though that article did not mention MVRDV in the text, our Peruri88 project in Jakarta was given the dubious distinction of being the article's most prominent image.

We'd like to discuss this common critique. The point of the role of visualizations in our communication is relevant but, even though we fully understand where the criticism comes from, arguments such as these are in our opinion not correct.

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MVRDV and the Mayor of Lyon have revealed plans to transform the city's Part-Dieu shopping center. The commission, awarded to MVRDV after the practice won a competition in 2013, focuses on preserving the center's original identity while redefining its public spaces and revitalizing its "iconic" facade. With MVRDV's scheme, the building's edges will "evaporate" as it reaches the street, creating a more inviting atmosphere that extends the public realm into the center.

After two years of further development, MVRDV has released new images of their masterplan for Caen in Normandy, "La Grande Mosaïque." The masterplan, which was first revealed in May 2013, re-envisions a 600 hectare area of the center of Caen and the Caen Peninsula, connecting the city to the neighboring towns of Hérouville Saint-Clair and Mondeville.

The design attempts to counter the effects of the area's de-industrialization, integrating historic and environmental elements of the area into the new masterplan. The release of these new images also marks the opening of an exhibition of the design, which will be on public display in "Le Pavillon" in the old city port until the 13th March 2016 in an attempt to engage local residents.

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MVRDV has taken it upon themselves to reimagine the Chinese Hutong. Focusing in on Beijing's prominent and currently vacant Xianyukou Hutong, the practice has set out to define its future and envision "the next hutong" - one that is "monumental, dense, green, mixed and individual" and can be built in phases.

MVRDV, working alongside The Urbanist Collective and LLJ Architects, has been selected in a competition to transform downtown Tainan in Taiwan with their design for new green corridor and urban lagoon connecting the city to its waterfront. Transforming the area of Tainan known as the T-axis, the design will see the city's Haian Road turned into a public park and connected to the city's canal by demolishing the existing China-Town Mall, a commercial structure built alongside the canal in 1983 and described by MVRDV as a "rotten tooth of downtown Tainan."

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Rotterdam will soon have a new cabinet of curiosities to add to its collection of architectural icons. For many years the city's Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, originally established in 1849, has required a safer space to house its world-class collection of painting, sculpture and prints – a collection which is said to have a total value of €7billion ($7.5billion). Last week the Municipality of Rotterdam voted in favour of the building’s construction and, with zoning approved, "the world’s first fully accessible art storage facility" is now slated to open its doors in 2018.

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Nearly 100 architects, designers, and consultants have been developing designs for a competition for the new government quarter in Oslo. Drawing an initial 24 entries, the intent of the competition was to generate viable solutions for the future relocation of all government ministries (excluding the defense ministry), emphasizing an urban atmosphere and public elements. In the six shortlisted proposals from both local and international firms, including BIG, Snøhetta, and MVRDV, the themes of building tall and introducing green space emerged.

Now a ten-member committee of industry professionals will assist Statsbygg, the public construction advisers collaborating on the government's behalf, with the evaluation of each design. Take a look at the six proposals after the break.

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If you search the web for information on MVRDV's Glass Farm, you'll find plenty of people writing about the project's 33-year history, and about its context in the small town of Schijndel. You'll even find plenty of people theorizing on the nature of those glass walls, and the relationships between image and authenticity and between modern technology and modest tradition. But strangely, you'll find almost no information on how the project made use of Digital Ceramic Printing, a relatively new process which was able to handle the many colors, variable transparency and fine tolerances required to display an entire farmhouse facade across a thousand glass panels.

In this new installment of our Material Minds series, presented by ArchDaily Materials, we spoke to MVRDV's project leader on the Glass Farm Gijs Rikken, and to Niv Raz, an Architect at Dip-Tech - the company who produces the printers, ink, software and support required for the process.

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MVRDV has been announced as winner of a two-stage, BAI-backed competition for a new “spatially-flexible” tower with a twisting “hourglass figure” near Vienna’s world famous Gasometers. The 110-meter “Turm mit Taille” (Tower with Waist) was shaped to minimize the effect of the building’s shadow cast onto neighboring buildings and an adjacent metro station.

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MVRDV, together with Munich-based morePlatz, have been selected among seven teams in an international competition to design two office buildings in Mainz, Germany. The five- and eleven-story “Hafenspitze” structures are expected to spearhead the transformation of the former Zollhafen industrial harbor, which plans to become a new mixed-use city quarter over the coming decades.

More about the towers' design, after the break.