ArchDaily: The Latest Architecture and News

The year 2011 was a great one for ArchDaily, and all thanks to you. In terms of web traffic, in our network we grew to more than 200,000 daily readers who viewed 350 million pages during 2011. Our social media reach has grown to nearly 500,000 Facebook fans, more than 60,000 followers on Twitter and an ever growing presence on Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest, all connecting with architects around our passion: Architecture.

ArchDaily is more than big numbers. It is recognized as the ultimate source of inspiration for thousands of architects around the world, who are covering new ground in architectural discussion, and generating new opportunities by being part of the world’s largest architecture network. During 2011, we participated in important events, such as the Pritzker Prize ceremony in DC, the AIA National Convention in New Orleans, among others, and visiting architects all across the US, in the UK, Switzerland, Israel, Brazil, Chile and Argentina. We’ve had the chance to interview renowned architects such as Steven Holl, Renzo Piano, Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, and a long list of people who are advancing this profession. We spoke at the AIA Arkansas Convention, Harvard GSD, along with other events and schools. We launched our first local version, ArchDaily Brasil (more to come during this year!) and introduced our first tool to help architects collect and order information: My ArchDaily. We will continue to work very hard during 2012, with all our passion, to keep you connected to everything that is happening in the architecture world and help you with tools, as you will be the responsible of the noble task to shape our built environment.

Since 2009 we have held the Building of the Year Awards, an instance in which all of you make your voice heard by nominating and voting for the best projects featured on ArchDaily during the year. This is a peer based award that recognizes firms of all sizes, trajectories and locations. You can check the results of the previous editions here: 2009 and 2010.

Once again we have partnered with HP to present the 2011 Building of the Year Awards, starting today Feb 7th, 2012 at the following link:

http://www.archdaily.com/building-of-the-year/2011/

The nomination stage will run for 2 weeks until Feb 21st, 2011. All buildings featured under the available categories during 2011 are elegible for this round. You can nominate one building (in one category) per day.

Like last year, we will authenticate the votes with the My ArchDaily platform, so we can assure that the nominating and voting processes are conducted by the community. You can nominate once per day, so you can propose your favorite projects from Feb 7th to Feb 21st, after which 5 buildings per category will continue to the voting round, between Feb 22nd and Mar 6th. The winners will be announced on Mar 7th, 2012.

Given that you are in charge of the selection process, we have decided to give away 2 custom engraved iPads 2 during the nominating/voting stages (more details on the rules below). Also, the most voted firm will receive an HP Designjet T2300 eMFP printer (MSRP US$8,000).

Once again I’d like to thank all our readers for your support in 2011, and rest assure that we are working on new ways to improve ArchDaily in 2012. Our inbox is always open, so feel free to leave your feedback, recommendations and support on the contact page.

Rules after the break:

Dear readers,

Dear readers,

Next week we will be taking our Architecture City Guide to Shanghai and we need your help. To make the City Guides more engaging we are asking for your input on which designs should comprise our weekly list of 12. In order for this to work we will need you, our readers, to suggest a few of your favorite modern/contemporary buildings for the upcoming city guide in the comment section below. Along with your suggestions we ask that you provide a link to an image you took of the building that we can use, the address of the building, and the architect. (The image must be from a site that has a Creative Common License cache like Flickr or Wikimedia. We cannot use images that are copyrighted unless they are yours and you give us permission.) From that we will select the top 12 most recommended buildings. Hopefully this method will help bring to our attention smaller well done projects that only locals truly know. With that in mind we do not showcase private single-family residences for obvious reasons. Additionally, we try to only show completed projects.

Next week we will be taking our Architecture City Guide to Beijing and we need your help. To make the City Guides more engaging we are asking for your input on which designs should comprise our weekly list of 12. In order for this to work we will need you, our readers, to suggest a few of your favorite modern/contemporary buildings for the upcoming city guide in the comment section below. Along with your suggestions we ask that you provide a link to an image you took of the building that we can use, the address of the building, and the architect. (The image must be from a site that has a Creative Common License cache like Flickr or Wikimedia. We cannot use images that are copyrighted unless they are yours and you give us permission.) From that we will select the top 12 most recommended buildings. Hopefully this method will help bring to our attention smaller well done projects that only locals truly know. With that in mind we do not showcase private single-family residences for obvious reasons. Additionally, we try to only show completed projects.

Next week we will be taking our Architecture City Guide to Paris and we need your help. To make the City Guides more engaging we are asking for your input on which designs should comprise our weekly list of 12. In order for this to work we will need you, our readers, to suggest a few of your favorite modern/contemporary buildings for the upcoming city guide in the comment section below. Along with your suggestions we ask that you provide a link to an image you took of the building that we can use, the address of the building, and the architect. (The image must be from a site that has a Creative Common License cache like Flickr or Wikimedia. We cannot use images that are copyrighted unless they are yours and you give us permission.) From that we will select the top 12 most recommended buildings. Hopefully this method will help bring to our attention smaller well done projects that only locals truly know. With that in mind we do not showcase private single-family residences for obvious reasons. Additionally, we try to only show completed projects.

Next week we will be taking our Architecture City Guide to London and we need your help. To make the City Guides more engaging we are asking for your input on which designs should comprise our weekly list of 12. In order for this to work we will need you, our readers, to suggest a few of your favorite modern/contemporary buildings for the upcoming city guide in the comment section below. Along with your suggestions we ask that you provide a link to an image you took of the building that we can use, the address of the building, and the architect. (The image must be from a site that has a Create Common License cache like Flickr or Wikimedia. We cannot use images that are copyrighted unless they are yours and you give us permission.) From that we will select the top 12 most recommended buildings. Hopefully this method will help bring to our attention smaller well done projects that only locals truly know. With that in mind we do not showcase private single-family residences for obvious reasons. Additionally, we try to only show completed projects.

We want to try a new bottom-up approach to our Architecture City Guides and we need your help. To make the City Guides much more engaging we are asking for your input on which designs should comprise our weekly list of 12. In order for this to work we will need you, our readers, to suggest a few of your favorite modern/contemporary buildings for the upcoming city guide in the comment section below. Along with your suggestions we ask that you provide a link to a Flickr image you took of the building that we can use, the address of the building, and the architect. From that we will select the top 12 most recommended buildings. Hopefully this method will help bring to our attention smaller well done projects that only locals truly know. With that in mind we do not showcase private single-family residences for obvious reasons.

Summer is around the corner, and many of you are wondering what to do with all that precious free time you didn’t have until now. What about spending it doing your internship at the most read architecture website, working with a highly motivated group of architecture lovers, contributing to keep the architecture community informed about projects and news around the world?

If you live in USA (London is also a possibility), please follow the break for all the details on what we are looking for (and what you can expect from us). More information after the break.

After two weeks and more than 15,000 nominations, we are proud to announce the finalists for the 2010 Building of the Year Award, a selection of the finest architecture made by our readers.

70 projects in 14 categories are running for the award, and the finalists list is incredible. From headquarters of large corporations, luxury hotels and incredible museums, to a temporary bar, a parking building and small apartments. The list of offices includes renowned international practices such as Herzog & de Meuron, Foster + Partners, REX, BIG, to small young firms from Sweden, Portugal, Slovenia and more.

I’d like to thank everyone who participated during the nominations round, the selection is amazing!

You can vote for your favorite projects starting today and until Feb 13th at midnight EST (all the rules here):

http://www.archdaily.com/building-of-the-year/2010/

Your votes will give you the chance to win an iPad, same as Cody McNeal who just won one for voting during the nominations round.

Remember: the office of the project with most votes during the final round will receive an HP Designjet T2300 eMFP printer.

And the finalists are:

Last week to vote for the Building of the Year Awards! The finalists chosen by you represent a wide scope of projects, in terms of scale, budget, materials, programs, location, etc.

After thousand of nominations in the last 3 weeks, we are proud to announce the finalists for the Building of the Year Awards, a selection made by our readers.

65 projects in 13 categories are now running for the award, with a very good selection of buildings, ranging from large campus buildings to small libraries with no budget, featuring renowned practices such as DS+R, OMA, REX, Tadao Ando, and small young firms from from around the world.

To thank our readers we have decided to give away an iPod Touch, more details at the Awards page.

Remember that you can vote once per day here: Building of the Year Awards page.

And the nominees are:

First, I have to thank all of you!!!

Thanks to your support we made it to the shortlist for Best Online Magazine at the Open Web Awards.

As you may know, to celebrate 25,000 fans on our Facebook Fans (we are now over 29,000!), we launched a competition to look for the best architectural animation video. We received many submissions and now it’s time for you to decide the winner. You have till December 6 to cast your vote.

The good thing is you may vote once per day, so come back here and vote to support your favorite entry! Results will be published on December 7 and the winner will receive a brand new iPod Touch. See all the videos after the break and startvoting right now!

To see the videos in a larger size, just click on them to launch them on YouTube.

Mashable and Motorola are running the 2009 Open Web Awards.

The idea is that people nominate Websites, Flickrs, Facebook Pages or Twitter accounts during a first round, and the top 5 nominees for each category go to the final round of voting to determine the best of the web.

It’s been a year and a couple of months since we first started ArchDaily.

With the one mission of “broadcasting architecture worldwide” we have already published 1,200 architecture related posts and our readers have engaged with more than 12,000 comments in architecture related discussions.

Architecture is the most frequent word we use. We are architects and we love architecture. With this in mind, we have again decided to search and rank the best sites devoted to architecture only. This is not an easy job and of course it can be considered a subjective topic (as it is with every ranking). In order to reduce subjective observations, this year we have decided to consider only a recognized third party ranking system: alexa.com.

Based in our extensive architecture and Internet experience complemented with previous feedback from our readers, we came out with a list of 20 English written sites devoted to architecture only and ranked them according to alexa.com. Alexa ranks with a number 1 the most popular website in the world, which is now google.com.

Last week we gave you 5 reasons to follow @archdaily on Twitter. If you are following us, then you already know that we are attending the Pritzker ceremony today, and that we are going to interview an architecture master from Japan in a few weeks.

Well, this has been one of the most intense weeks I´ve had in quite so time. Postopolis! LA has turned to be an amazing event: An incredible venue at the rooftop of The Standard Hotel in downtown, a very interesting group of speakers, very proactive attendants, networking and drinks. And of course, the presence of our friends from BLDGBLOG (Geoff), City of Sound (Dan), Subtopia (Bryan), Mudd Up! (Jayce, a.k.a. dj/Rupture), We Make Money Not Art (Regina), The Storefront Gallery (Joseph, Cesar) and ForYouArt (Bettina, Devin).

During these days we had the chance to conduct live interviews with wHY Architectura (Yo Hakomori), Oyler Wu Collective (Dwayne Oyler, Jenny Wu), Sander Architects (Whitney Sander) and JohnstonMarkLee (Sharon Johnston, Mark Lee). These have turned to be very interesting, as you saw on the live streaming. Also, the audience has been participating making questions to the architects. And i have good news for this, as we got a new microphone and the audio recording is great! So expect the edited interviews to be posted soon.

Today we are going to interview Austin Kelly from XTEN Architecture, so if you´ve got any questions write a comment and i´ll try to get him to answer them. You can see the interview via Ustream at 5PM Pacific time.

As for the rest of the speakers, I´ve been impressed for the variety of architecture related topics discussed… urbanism, communes, sustainability… i really liked the presentations by Jeffrey Inaba (Inaba Projects), Patrick Keller (Fabric) and Stephanie Smith (Ecoshack, check her awesome project Wanna Start a Commune?). And there´s more to come, so be sure to check the full schedule. The quality of the Ustream feed is very good, so be sure to check it out.

Be sure to follow @Postopolis on Twitter (and also @archdaily) for live updates. There´s also a Flickr group, with very good photos.

We thank the StoreFront Gallery, ForYourArt and The Standard Hotel LA for making this event possible, one of the best by far.

And please remember that we have a closing party on Saturday!

p.s.: The hotel charges for going to the rooftop after 7PM on Friday, so be sure to arrive a bit earlier.

Check some photos of the event by David Assael after the break: