2010 has been a great year for ArchDaily, and all thanks to you. During this year we doubled our traffic, our Facebook page grew to over 180,000 fans, we have over 24,000 active followers on Twitter and more than 40,000 photos in our Flickr group. But this is not just about numbers. It’s about sharing your projects with thousands of architects around the world, it’s about taking architectural discussion to new grounds, it’s about creating opportunities, it’s about being part of the world’s largest architecture network.

Last year we decided to celebrate this by instating the Building of the Year Award, which recognizes the best buildings around the world based on your votes. You nominated the top 5 in each category and you chose the final winners, which include renowned practices such as Asymptote and Bjarke Ingles Group (check them all here).

This year we have partnered with HP and Graphisoft to present you the 2010 Building of the Year Awards, starting today Jan 19th, 2011 at the following link:

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

The nomination stage will run for 2 weeks until Jan 31th, 2011. All buildings featured during 2010 are elegible for this round. You can nominate one building (in one category) per day.

This year we have decided to authenticate the votes using the registered users at My ArchDaily, 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 Jan 19th to Jan 31th, after which 5 buildings per category will continue to the voting round, between Feb 1st and  Feb 13th. The winners will be announced on Feb 15th, 2011.

Given that you are in charge of the selection process, we have decided to give away 2 iPads during the nominating/voting stages (more details on the rules below).

Once again I’d like to thank all our readers for your support in 2010, and rest assure that we are working on new ways to improve ArchDaily in 2011.

Official rules after the break.

Some time ago we visited New York City based Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, to interview founding principals Marion Wesis and Michael Manfredi. The multidisciplinary firm has distinguished themselves with their holistic design approach, successfully integrating the disciplines of architecture, art, infrastructure, and landscape design.

During the AIA Convention we had the opportunity to talk with Peter Bohlin (FAIA), founding principal of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and one of the most renowned architects in the US.

I was asking myself this question a few minutes ago, so went online to do some quick research and Googled “How much do architects earn per hour?”.

During the 2010 AIA Convention in Miami we had the opportunity to interview Todd Walker (FAIA) and Barry Alan Yoakum (FAIA), founders of the architecture/design collective Archimania.

Founded in 1995, Archimania has won over 100 awards, including national, regional and local recognition. More importantly though is how the firm has distinguished themselves by their collaborative design approach, no project to big or to small, relationship with their clients, and innovative solutions to creating real value in their architecture.

Featuring a diverse portfolio that pushes the envelope, Archimania is known for their unique client architect relationship. The firm truly emphases teamwork, focusing on an active listening role with clients, resulting in their Visioning Charrette, a design process that is collaborative – creating places that reflect vision.

Archimania is dedicated to their home state of Tennessee, often utilizing local materials in their designs. Setting themselves apart from the crowd, the firm sees each project as a way of further expanding the community’s ideas about the built environment, recognizing the role of an architect within the community not as a passive one, but rather one as a local leader.

Archimania projects at ArchDaily:

• SkyCottage
• House in the Woods
• Tabor Orthopedics
• Orange House
• Wurzburg Retreat
• DOGone House

More info on their projects after the break:

“Ninety-eight percent of buildings are boxes, which tells me that a lot of people are in denial. We live and work in boxes. People don’t even notice that. Most of what’s around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, ‘This is the world the way it is, and don’t bother me.’ Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it’s new and scary.”

“The thing is, I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work. The press comes up with this stuff and it sticks. I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It’s demeaning. It’s derisive, and once it’s said, it sticks. I get introduced all the time, ‘Here’s starchitect Frank Gehry…’ My reaction: ‘What the fuck are you talking about?‘”

Don´t miss Frank Ghery’s epic interview on the January issue of Playboy.

More snippets of the interview after the break:

We, the architects, are a special breed. We have very particular tastes, dress in very particular ways and we even invented our own language. For us, a pen can be even more meaningful than our computers, and you might find yourself looking all around town for that perfect standard notebook that you have used for ages. So we decided to compile this special gift guide with things that we use, we like, and that we would love to find below our christmas tree.

Hope you like it! Feel free to share your gift ideas for architects on the comments below.

Back in June we had the chance to interview Lawrence Scarpa in Miami, at the AIA Convention when Pugh + Scarpa Architects received the 2010 AIA Firm Award.

We visited Asymptote’s new offices in Brooklyn to interview Hani Rashid.

Remember Zebra’s holographic sheets we presented you back in February? Well, Zebra Imaging has released new videos that show how this technology can be used for planners/urban designers (as seen on Seattle’s video above), or to get an accurate preview of HVAC.

Price for this sheets? $1,500 for a 12- x 18-inch version to $3,500 for the largest 2- x 3-foot size.

Another video after the break:

Our favorite browser is now Google Chrome. It works on every platform here at the office (Mac, Windows, Linux), it’s fast, secure, easy to use, helps you search the web and makes our life easier.

A great lecture by Shohei Shigematsu (partner at OMA, in charge of the NY office) at U Laval in Canada. Shohei talks about architecture in the financial crisis (based on his research of how they have affected architecture in the past, also related to OMA’s projects in NY), the almost completed Milstein Hall at Cornell and OMA’s winning entry for the MNBAQ extension (skip to 7:00 for the english part).

Office disputes happen all the time, it’s in our architect’s DNA.

On last week’s Family Guy episode the characters go to NY, illustrated by the Highline with the Standard Hotel.

Since 2000, the MoMA and the P.S.1 have been running a competition under their Young Architects Program, each year inviting a group of emerging architects to experiment with new shapes and materials, resulting in a summer installation at the P.S.1. Past winners include WORK ac (P.F.1. Public Farm 1), MOS (Afterparty) and SO-IL (Pole Dance). Architects Newspaper recently announced the short list for the 2011 summer installation, which includes Interboro Partners (NY), FormlessFinder (NY), Matter Architecture Practice (NY) MASS Design Group (Boston) and IJP Corporation Architects (London). Matter Architecture practice was already invited to the 2008 competition, which also happened to MOS back in 2007, then winners in 2009. As usual expect a complete coverage here at ArchDaily, we look forward to see all the projects!

Our profession is all about presentations. It all started at university in the architecture studio, a whole semester had to be condensed into a 10-minute precise presentation in order to get the crits to understand your project, and it continued into professional life as the main tool to communicate with your co-workers, clients, a jury or with other architects in a lecture.

A good presentation could get your project approved, or quickly dismissed if you don’t plan it right. For example, a presentation to a client compared to a presentation for a group of architects is very different, even if the project you need to communicate is the same.

As I usually have to give at least a couple presentations per month, I have always tried to make them worth and not waste other people’s time. A big help for that has been Garr Reynolds, the “Presentation Zen” from which I haven taken some key points of which I will share with you in order to make a good presentation, adapted to our profession.

This Inspiration Series is brought to you by Veer.com

Every day we spend quite some time visiting architect’s websites (maybe even yours!) to be up to date with new and ongoing projects.

It’s a very fun part of our job, especially when websites have a good design and usability. However from time to time we stumble upon websites that are very difficult to browse, or present projects in a way that you can’t even understand them.

You know that we as architects have the ability to design “from a spoon to a city”, and a website should be among those things we can (and should) design, especially when it is one of our most important marketing tools. I’m not saying that you should learn HTML and code your own website, but as we know from our work, an informed client is a good client. Therefore, having a good idea on what your website should offer to its visitors can help you relate with the person you hire to maintain it, the same way we love when a client has a clear idea on how they want their building to be… and not asking for a “green roof” just because they read it in some random magazine.

Below you will find a few tips that can help you on this process. I’m very confident that some of you may already know about some of them, and it’d be great if you could share your comments based on your experience.

While in Miami for the 2010 AIA Convention we had the chance to visit Chad Oppenheim, founder of Oppenheim Architecture + Design.

The firm specializes in world class hospitality, residential and mixed-use design, with a focus on sustainability. Some of these works include a villa in Dellis Cay for Mandarin Oriental, Villa Allegra, the COR Tower (featured next in AD), Starwood’s DC 1 Hotel in Washington, the Campus Center, the Enea Headquarters and smaller projects suchas the Simpson Park Hammock Pavilion, among several others. Oppenheim’s designs in the Miami area stand out in a developer-driven market.

In the next few days we are going to feature several of his recent projects so you can have a better idea about the firm. Please find the rest of the interview below: