Are these the best buildings in the world? Reveal the list of nominees for the 2018 RIBA awards

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The Sancaklar Mosque in Istanbul by Emre Arolat Architecture (EAA) has shaped a pilgrimage site in a landscape similar to a meadow overlooking Lake Büyükçekmece. (Credit: Emden Cemal Courtesy)

(CNN) - The RIBA 2018 international list, announced on Wednesday, is a biennial selection of some of the best new or recently completed buildings, which have dazzling shapes, functions and styles.

Among some of the 62 individual buildings in 29 countries are the four that will eventually be scrutinized by the grand jury of the 2018 RIBA International Prize.

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The 2018 list "illustrates the significant impact and transformative quality that well-designed buildings can have on communities, wherever they are in the world," said Ben Derbyshire, president of RIBA. This is "the prize for buildings that sets the gold standard for architectural achievement," he adds.

There are nine categories of buildings that include public and private offices, pilgrimage sites, private houses and museums, apartment blocks, assembly plants, buildings that respond to conflict and natural disasters and new architectural landscapes.

Watch the nominees here:

The headquarters of the Bremer Landesbank bank in Bremen, Germany. (Credit: Courtesy Hélène Binet)

Among those categories are a bright mosque like no other outside Istanbul; a visitor center with a thatched roof in the dunes of Jutland, where millions of migratory birds can be observed; and a couple of "vertical forest" apartment blocks in a revitalized industrial district of Milan.

A sense of place

The Wadden Sea Center in Denmark (Credit: Courtesy Adam Mørk)

Many nominated buildings seem to be an integral part of the landscape they inhabit. Although a large new building, the Wadden Sea Center on the Danish coast, by Dorte Mandrup Architects, for example, has a feeling of happy inevitability: this is the landscape to which it should belong.

Likewise, the low and gently undulating shape of the new Lisbon Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), designed by the architectural firm AL_A of London, feels like a natural part of the Tagus riverbank in Portugal, even though Its design is radically new. At one end, the museum plunges into the Tagus in a sequence of long and wide steps for sitting or walking that are revealed at low tide.

• READ: The most beautiful and ambitious buildings nominated for the 2017 Building of the Year architecture award

When the past finds the present

The RIBA list also shows handmade brick buildings with a feeling of warmth and a degree of historical familiarity that are returning to city centers where elegant steel and glass designs have dominated.

The new city hall building in the Netherlands, by Neutelings Riedijk Architects and the facilities of the Bremer Landesbank in Bremen, Germany, by Caruso St. John are two buildings that show that modern office buildings can be part of their own era while Elbow comfortably with its medieval and Renaissance predecessors.

The town hall of Devente in the Netherlands. (Credit: Courtesy Scagliola Brakkee)

Among all the nominees is the Lanka Learning Center by Feat.Collective on the east coast of Sri Lanka, where “the goal was to create a place where disadvantaged children from different ethnic and religious affiliations can join in different educational activities and sports, and thus make a better possible future, ”says the RIBA statement. It does so in a simple and simple way with a protective circle of low-energy and discreet buildings that fit the place quite naturally.

The challenge of the jurors of the RIBA 2018 International Prize is quite difficult. The decision will be known in December 2018.

Architecture Style