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Spas, swimming pools, and saunas are spaces to which we turn in search of positive experiences, especially healing and sanitation. What characterizes all of these spaces is a requirement to wear little clothing--or even none at all--meaning that these spaces have very different expectations regarding nudity, privacy, and the human body when compared to other forms of architecture. From the point of view of design, nudity requires specific spatial conditions, forcing architects to think carefully about details such as the opacity of materials and the dimensions of space. With this in mind, this week we present a selection of the 15 best images of healing spaces, captured by renowned photographers such as Kevin Scott, Clément Guillaume, and Marcello Mariana.

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At ArchDaily, we're lucky enough to know a fantastic network of architecture professionals, allowing us to share the world's best architecture with our audience. But our articles wouldn't be the same without the many photographers who dedicate themselves to making incredible, inspiring images. For that reason, here we present the 50 most popular architecture images of 2017.

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The inclusion of cars in photographs of architecture is an interesting tool that can help the viewer to understand the scale of a building. The addition of an automobile to a scene can not only help to transmit a notion of the size of the photographed elements, it can also be used to generate interesting compositional relationships to benefit the photograph as a whole. Below, we've highlighted a selection of 10 images from prominent photographers such as Rafael Gamo, Michael Sinclair and Bruno Candiotto which make effective use of this technique.

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Unbeknown to many, cork is something of a dark horse when it comes to the environment—a model of a sustainable industry and building material. By its very nature, cork is both recyclable and renewable, as it is the only tree that regenerates its bark, while harvesting that bark causes the tree no harm.

Cork has been sneaking its way into our buildings for many years now; due to its hard-wearing properties it can be found, for example, in the checkerboard flooring of the Library of Congress. Even NASA has been wise to cork's light weight and insulation capacity, using it as an insulator for their space shuttles.

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Videos

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Proven to be tied to the areas of the brain responsible for emotion and memory, smells are more tied to a perception of place than any other human sense. And there are few sensations more powerful than the smell of delicious food wafting in from your own kitchen. In that regard, kitchens are the true heart of the home, the space most closely related to joyfulness, childhood, and family.

Here, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite kitchens that also double as dining rooms – spaces where you can bake your cake and eat it too. Each different in material and arrangement, these kitchens all share one thing in common: We can’t seem to shake them from our memory. Check out the list below!

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This article was originally published by Common Edge as "Enduring Principles of Art That Also Apply to Architecture."

It is safe to say that architects, academics, critics and even the public have been arguing about the merits of architectural style for centuries. Even during the course of my own career, the more general style categories of contemporary-vs-traditional have continued in an unabated battle. For better or worse, contemporary has generally won out as the default position for most schools and publications, probably because of the sheer visual entertainment value it offers, and the lucrative merits of its two stepchildren, branding and advertising.

I’d like to propose another position: that certain enduring principles of art, rather than any temporary style—and, remember, they are all temporary—should be our real architectural goal. This presumption means you must be agnostic when it comes to style and put aside any notion of an ideological stance regarding the right or wrong of your architectural preferences. There are those, of course, who say that to imagine that “my art” is better than yours, or even that I can define real art in the first place, is a fool’s errand.

I think otherwise.

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We are accustomed to seeing photographs in which architecture is recorded without any occupants, or perhaps captured only with models who give scale to the spaces shown. However, in recent years architectural photographers have increasingly decided to humanize the houses they document, presenting not only their architecture, but also those who inhabit these buildings. In this week's best photos, we present a selection of 15 houses captured by renowned photographers such as Luc Roymans, Adrien Williams and Fernando Schapochnik.