With the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial in full swing and open to the public until January 7, 2017, we've scoured the galleries, halls and corridors of the Chicago Cultural Center to bring you our favorite fifteen installations. Documented through the lens of Laurian Ghinitoiu and assembled by our Editorial Team on location, this selection intends to shed light on the breadth, scope and preoccupations of Make New History – the largest architecture event in North America.

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After two weeks of nominations and voting, last week we announced the 16 winners of the 2017 Building of the Year Awards. In addition to providing inspiration, information, and tools for architecture lovers from around the world, ArchDaily seeks to offer a platform for the many diverse and global voices in the architecture community. In this year's Building of the Year Awards that range of voices was once again on display, with 75,000 voters from around the world offering their selections to ultimately select 16 winners from over 3,000 published projects.

Behind each of those projects are years of research, design, and labor. In the spirit of the world's most democratic architecture award, we share the stories behind the 16 buildings that won over our global readership with their urban interventions, humanitarianism, playfulness, and grandeur.

With two weeks of nominations and voting now complete, we are happy to present the winners of the 2017 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards. As a peer-based, crowdsourced architecture award, these winners were chosen by the collective intelligence of over 75,000 votes from ArchDaily readers around the world, filtering over 3,000 projects down to the 16 best works featured on ArchDaily in 2016.

The winners, as always, include a diversity of architectural output from around the globe. Alongside high-profile, perhaps even predictable winners—who would have bet against BIG's first completed project in New York or Herzog & de Meuron's long-awaited philharmonic hall in Hamburg?—are more niche and surprise winners, from Nicolás Campodonico's off-grid chapel in Argentina to ARCHSTUDIO's organic food factory in China. The list also features some returning favorites such as spaceworkers, whose Casa Cabo de Vila brings them their second win in the housing category, repeating their success from 2015.

In being published on ArchDaily, these 16 exemplary buildings have helped us to continue our mission, bringing inspiration, knowledge, and tools to architects around the world. This award wouldn't be possible without the hundreds of firms that choose to publish their projects with ArchDaily every year, or without those who take part in the voting process to become part of our thousands-strong awards jury. To everyone who took part—either by submitting a project in the past year, or by nominating and voting for candidates in the past weeks—thank you for giving strength to this award. And of course, congratulations to all the winners!

Read on to see the full list of winning projects.

With our annual Building of the Year Awards, over 30,000 readers narrowed down over 3,000 projects, selecting just 14 as the best examples of architecture that ArchDaily has published in the past year. The results have been celebrated and widely shared, of course, usually in the form of images of each project. But what is often forgotten in this flurry of image sharing is that every one of these 14 projects has a backstory of significance which adds to our understanding of their architectural quality.

Some of these projects are intelligent responses to pressing social issues, others are twists on a well-established typology. Others still are simply supreme examples of architectural dexterity. In order that we don't forget the tremendous amount of effort that goes into creating each of these architectural masterpieces, continue reading after the break for the 14 stories that defined this year's Building of the Year Awards.

After two weeks of nominations and voting, we are pleased to present the winners of the 2015 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards. As a peer-based, crowdsourced architecture award, the results shown here represent the collective intelligence of 31,000 architects, filtering the best architecture from over 3,000 projects featured on ArchDaily during the past year.

The winning buildings represent a diverse group of architects, from Pritzker Prize winners such as Álvaro Siza, Herzog & de Meuron and Shigeru Ban, to up-and-coming practices such as EFFEKT and Building which have so far been less widely covered by the media. In many cases their designs may be the most visually striking, but each also approaches its context and program in a unique way to solve social, environmental or economic challenges in communities around the world. By publishing them on ArchDaily, these 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.