After two intense weeks, with 40,000 nominations, the collective intelligence formed by the readers of ArchDaily has scrutinized close to 3,000 projects, creating the shortlist that now moves into the final voting stage.

As in previous years, we have to congratulate our readers, as the finalists are outstanding. Buildings from all over the world, by firms of all sizes and trajectories, ranging from social buildings with no budget to state of the art buildings. But they all have something in common: good architecture that can improve people’s lives.

You can vote for your favorite projects starting today and until February 13th, 2013 (read the complete rules).

Remember that the project with the most votes will receive an HP Designjet T520 ePrinter and the project with the 2nd most votes will receive an HP Designjet T120 ePrinter from our sponsor HP.

The winners of the iPad Minis that we are giving away during the nomination process are: Sunil Bald and Susana Carls (you’ll receive an email shorty). And remember that we are giving away two iPads during the final voting round!

Meet the finalists:

While we were in Beijing, we had the opportunity to visit an architect who we have been following for quite some time: Ma Yansong, founder of MAD.

For the 4th consecutive year, we are proud to announce the Building of the Year Awards. During the past year we continued to grow, reaching over 280,000 daily visitors and close to 70 million page views per month. We also expanded our ever-growing network of architects on social media: 640,000 fans on Facebook, 105,000 followers on Twitter, 40,000 followers on Instagram and more than 100,000 photos contributed to our Flickr group.

But ArchDaily is more than numbers. The world faces fundamental problems, related to health, energy, climate, and more. And almost all these problems are related to the built environment.

We launched ArchDaily Mexico this year, which joins ArchDaily, ArchDaily Brasil and Plataforma Arquitectura in our mission to improve the quality of life for the 3 billion people who will live in cities in the next 40 years. How can we do this? By providing the inspiration, tools and knowledge to the architects who will face this challenge. By connecting the traditional hot-spots of architectural production with emerging economies (where a lot of innovation is happening). We believe that, in this way, the constant iteration of architecture will accelerate and result in better and faster solutions to the world’s issues.

That’s why the Building of the Year Awards are so important for us. It is a peer-based award process that identifies and recognizes projects with impact. It will be up to you, the architect, to nominate and choose the winners for each category. It will be up to you to be a part of a collective intelligence that will judge more than 2,700 projects – a scope we think is unprecedented in the world of architecture.

The task is up to you.

For the next 4 weeks, you’ll be in charge of nominating buildings for the shortlist, and then voting for the winners. We will give away iPad Minis and 4th Generation iPads for voters, and will include amazing plotters (courtesy of our friends from HP) for the firms behind the two projects with the most votes.

Rules at a glance: During the nominating stage, each registered user of the My ArchDaily platform will be able to nominate once per day for their favorite projects (published between Jan 1st 2012 and Dec 31st 2012), the counter resets at midnight EST. This stage starts on Jan 15th and ends on Jan 29th at 11:59PM. After this, five projects per category will move into the voting stage, starting January 30th and ending on February 13th. The winner will be announced on February 14th. Start voting here.

You can review last year’s awarded projects in our free iPad App.

Detailed rules after the break:

During the 2012 World Architecture Festival held in Singapore, we had the opportunity to interview Richard Hassell, one of the founders of the highly acclaimed practice WOHA.

WE Architecture is a young firm based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Started by partners Marc Jay and Julie Schmidt-Nielsen in 2009, the practice is focused on public competitions and consultancy, along with teaching at the Royal Danish Academy. The partners studied in Denmark, but shaped their professional career working abroad in New York and Barcelona.

During the World Architecture Festival, held this October in Singapore, we had the opportunity to interview one of the UK’s most succesful landscape architects: Andrew Grant. On the occasion, the project, Gardens by the Bay, in collaboration with Wilkinson Eyre Architects, was awarded the World Building of the Year Award.

During the past few days, we have received many e-cards from the offices, architects and photographers that are part of the ArchDaily network. Images from their offices, new buildings, ongoing projects, and even a video, are part of the many xmas greetings we selected to share with you.

After the break, 85 architectural ways of saying: Merry Christmas!