20 outstanding new buildings in 16 countries, which could double as a travel list for architecture buffs

"These 20 outstanding projects were selected for their architectural ambition, ingenuity of design, and excellence in execution. Crucially, they demonstrate architecture's significant and far-reaching contribution to our everyday lives."

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the winners of the RIBA Awards for International Excellence 2018.

The awards went to 20 outstanding new buildings in 16 countries: large urban infrastructure schemes, private houses, cultural destinations, civic spaces, educational buildings and religious sites.

RIBA carries weight in the architecture world — the Stirling Prize and the Royal Gold Medal it runs are the most authoritative awards in British architecture — and the international award it set up in 2016 is open to architects everywhere, turning attention to the most inventive and most important new buildings anywhere in the world.

On this year's RIBA International Awards for Excellence, RIBA president Ben Derbyshire said: "The RIBA International Awards for Excellence 2018 is testament to the breadth and quality of architecture across the globe. These 20 outstanding projects were selected for their architectural ambition, ingenuity of design, and excellence in execution. Crucially, they demonstrate architecture's significant and far-reaching contribution to our everyday lives."

The winners include Boeri Studio's Vertical Forest, Foster + Partners' China Resources Xiaojingwan University in Shenzhen, the Toho Gakuen School of Music by the Japanese firm Nikken Sekkei, and Renzo Piano Building Workshop's Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens.

Here is the full list, if you would like to look through it.

Restoration of the Old Church of Vilanova de la Barca, by AleaOlea architecture & landscape

The old church of Vilanova de la Barca stands in the Spanish province of Lleida, a 13th-century Gothic building partly destroyed in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and left unrepaired ever since.

AleaOlea architecture & landscape took on the job of restoring the church's original appearance and turning it into a new multi-purpose space. The project builds a new brick exterior out of a lattice pattern and an Arabic tile roof. The whole thing reads as a new building in a ceramic shell, set lightly on the remains of the old walls. From outside it still looks like the old church; inside, new windows pick out an entrance full of daylight, and the courtyard in the new scheme is finished in white. The designers wanted a conversation between the old building and the new.

Audain Art Museum, by Patkau Architects

The Audain Art Museum stands in Whistler, Canada. Its museum space, more than 5,000 square meters, holds the private collection of Michael Audain, which runs from late-18th-century British Columbia to the present.

Patkau Architects' task was to give the art, inside and out, a quiet and plain natural setting. The simple black metal skin of the building fades into the shadow of the forest. Where that skin opens, it is wrapped in bright timber framing to form the entrance porch, which also becomes the view at the end of the glass corridor leading to the galleries.

BBVA Bancomer Tower, by LegoRogers (Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Legorreta + Legorreta)

The BBVA Bancomer Tower stands in Mexico City. At 253 meters it became Mexico's tallest building when it was finished, built jointly by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Legorreta + Legorreta. Its 50 floors give BBVA Bancomer 78,600 square meters of office space and hold close to 4,500 employees.

From the tower you can take in Chapultepec Park, Mexico's largest, and look down on Paseo de la Reforma, one of the country's most important streets.

The designers wanted the building to encourage employees to pull together and work with one another. Every ninth floor holds a sky garden, giving staff ample outdoor space for meetings and rest, with a 360-degree view. The interior layout answers its surroundings too: it breaks with the conventional office plan and connects the tower with the functional core inside, giving everyone who works there a varied and efficient place to work.

Fine Arts Museum, by Estudio Barozzi Veiga

The Fine Arts Museum stands in Chur, Switzerland. It is in fact an extension of Villa Planta, and it merges with the gardens around it into a new public area.

At a glance the museum looks like a building independent of the historic villa, but the designers worked to build a conversation between the two, based on the balance each holds within its own classical structure. Villa Planta is heavily ornamented and the museum's exterior is severely restrained, yet both present a centrally symmetrical plan. In the museum, the extension, that classical form also made it possible to simplify the structural system and to place galleries underground.

Avoiding surplus elements makes the museum feel fully worked out, and stripping away everything beyond structure, construction and the division of program leaves the whole unified and plain.

Captain Kelly's Cottage, by John Wardle Architects

Captain Kelly's Cottage sits on a sea cliff on Tasmania, an island in the South Pacific. Built in the 1840s for sailors, it had fallen into ruin.

John Wardle Architects came in to renovate the original building and extend it in a contemporary language, keeping its sense of history while fitting it better into the landscape around it.

New concrete walls replace the old timber, for strength and durability, and an outdoor dining area has been added.

Central European University, Phase 1 Campus Redevelopment, by O'Donnell + Tuomey

This Irish practice took on phase one of the campus plan for Central European University in Budapest, where the designers' thinking changed the relationship between the university and the city. Phase one covers the parts of the university open to the public: a library and a café for citizens and students alike. The campus merges with the city around it.

The existing campus was a set of adjoining buildings, each with its own entrance and almost no connection between them. The design team saw a chance to intervene in this city-center block and turn a group of separate, distinct buildings into an open campus. They linked the old facilities and the new with a series of courtyards that encourage different departments to meet and work together.

Children Village, by Rosenbaum + Aleph Zero

A children's village in Brazil, designed by Rosenbaum and Aleph Zero.

In a place whose way of life is built on farming and handicraft, keeping the building's intervention from jarring was the hard part. In working it out, the designers also shifted the school from a single-purpose place of study into a place that carries the meaning of "home."

Lanka Learning Center, by feat.collective

The Batticaloa region of Sri Lanka has suffered years of civil war and tsunami damage. The Institute for Architectural Space Concepts at the University of Stuttgart once ran a design seminar on the area, and the work from it became a learning center on Sri Lanka's east coast, built by local entrepreneurs, craftspeople and workers.

The building stands on an open site, on the condition that once finished it would be shaded by the trees. Five volumes of identical design enclose a generous courtyard.

Budapest Metro Line M4 – Kálvin tér Station, by PALATIUM Studio

Budapest's M4 metro line is the largest piece of infrastructure the city has built in the past decade and more. PALATIUM Studio steered the design of the whole project, with a series of engineering firms taking part in delivering it.

The M4 has 10 stations, and Kálvin tér is the largest. It is also the interchange with the M3, which makes it especially busy. The structure was built by the cut-and-cover method settled on at the start, and the bare concrete becomes the element that makes the whole underground space: X-shaped beams cross the escalators running up and down, like an underground palace of concrete art.

Memorial Hall of Israel's Fallen at Mount Herzl, by Kimmel Eshkolot Architects

The Memorial Hall of Israel's Fallen stands within the national cemetery on Mount Herzl and commemorates Israel's fallen soldiers.

The design team built it from undulating, funnel-shaped brickwork that opens the hall to the sky and fills the space with daylight. In 2006 the Ministry of Defense's Families, Commemoration and Heritage Division commissioned Kimmel Eshkolot Architects to design a 250-meter "Wall of Names" wrapping around the sculptural brick structure at the center. The spiral wall is made of more than 23,000 concrete bricks, each engraved with the name of a fallen soldier, and on each anniversary they are lit by incandescent lamps.

Musée d'arts de Nantes, by Stanton Williams

Renovated, extended and reopened to the public last summer, the Musée d'arts de Nantes has become a landmark cultural project for the city, and one of the largest fine art museums in France outside Paris.

The London practice Stanton Williams combined museum technology, carefully arranged around the collection, with contemporary architecture, turning an inward-looking museum into a lively, egalitarian and welcoming modern space open to the city and its citizens.

Voorlinden Museum, the Netherlands, by Kraaijvanger Architects

This is a museum building concerned with how to serve the display of art. Six dune-shaped colored walls stand in the landscape, and a slender glass facade opens the interior to the parkland around it. Elegant white columns carry an ingenious roof structure.

Symmetrical, spacious and modern, the building brings classical architecture to mind. Inside it is divided into three parts: a display area for the collection, a temporary exhibition area and a permanent exhibition area. There are 20 daylit galleries, an auditorium, a library, a print room, an education space, storage and a museum shop.

Sancaklar Mosque, by Emre Arolat Architects

Sancaklar Mosque stands in Büyükçekmece, a district on the outskirts of Istanbul. It sets out to answer some of the basic questions of mosque design by attending to the true spirit of religious space.

The site lies in a pasture, cut off by a highway from the gated suburban estates nearby. High walls rise around the park in the courtyard at the top of the mosque, drawing a clear boundary between the noisy world outside and the park within. A long canopy reaching out from the park is the only part of the building visible from outside. The mosque itself sits beneath that canopy and is entered from the upper courtyard, through the park. A stair of natural stone follows the natural slope of the land.

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center stands in Kallithea, 4 kilometers south of central Athens. Set in a landscaped park, it houses the National Library of Greece and the National Opera on a site of 170,000 square meters in all.

To improve the city's relationship with the sea, the project built an artificial hill on the southern edge of the site; the landscape climbs the slope and reaches the cultural center at the top, taking in a magnificent sea view. Opera and library share the building, joined by a public gathering space that also serves as its main entrance. Beneath the canopy on the library's top floor is a glass reading room with a 360-degree view of Athens and the Aegean.

Studio Dwelling at Rajagiriya, by Palinda Kannangara Architects

This is an architect's office and house, near a run of high-rises on the edge of a Sri Lankan city and close to a main road, and yet it still feels like a retreat: there is traffic noise, but the marsh next door offers unexpected views, and the building sinks completely into its natural surroundings.

The designer created varied spaces for living, working and rest, and also brought together daylight, the marsh landscape, and functions such as collecting and reusing rainwater.

Tatsumi Apartment House, by Hiroyuki Ito Architects

Tatsumi Apartment House is a housing project on the Tokyo waterfront, its site pressed up against a crowded street that crosses an expressway and a public transit station. The 10-story concrete building rises from a base of only 47.97 square meters, driven into the site like an upright pile. It uses a reinforced concrete structure to block traffic noise from the street and to damp the ground vibration from the subway station nearby.

The design team made full use of the narrow space between beams and columns. Inside the units they designed many places that drop below the floor plane or recess into the wall, so that sitting down or leaning back is more comfortable.

Toho Gakuen School of Music, by Nikken Sekkei

Toho Gakuen is a music school on the outskirts of Tokyo. When Nikken Sekkei took on the design, the brief was to make a place with more visual connection between music and its surroundings, not just an isolated space.

Students often prefer to work in the corridors or on the stairs rather than in a room of their own, for the different acoustics there. So the designers put classrooms and corridors alike to use as places to practice at the same time, while still keeping them acoustically separate.

University of Amsterdam Redevelopment, by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

Allford Hall Monaghan Morris carried out a large redevelopment at the University of Amsterdam. Two utilitarian historic buildings, in use for many years, were demolished and replaced by a tall new space that serves exchange between faculties and public functions alike, and opens new views across the campus.

The highlight is a footbridge inspired by Amsterdam's old canals, linking a series of public and commercial spaces and making a distinctive piece of streetscape inside the campus.

Vertical Forest, by Boeri Studio

The basic idea behind the Vertical Forest is to raise a city center's green coverage in three dimensions, without taking up any more urban land.

Phase one of the Vertical Forest is two residential towers, 110 meters and 80 meters tall, and a new home for beneficial insects and migrating birds. Building this vertical planting is the equivalent of setting a 10,000-square-meter forest down in the middle of the city; the microclimate it produces supplies residents with oxygen while absorbing surplus carbon dioxide and dust, and it screens out city noise effectively. The plants are watered with filtered domestic wastewater, which is recycled, and this promotes air movement and in turn cuts the whole building's air-conditioning load.

China Resources Xiaojingwan University, Shenzhen, by Foster + Partners

China Resources Xiaojingwan University in Shenzhen was founded by Dr. Fu Yuning, chairman of China Resources. The campus has 55,000 square meters of floor space and forms part of a wider regional development, which is also to include a hotel, clubs, retail and housing, creating a mixed-use district.

The campus sits on a hillside with a distant view of the South China Sea. Five hundred students will study here, and the design provides accommodation for 300 students and 35 faculty and staff. Five teaching buildings and an innovation center stand on the hilltop along the central boulevard, ending in the main auditorium building, with a lecture hall and meeting rooms for up to 580 people. The library, a small auditorium, a student bar, a gymnasium and the dormitories are set on the hillside below, with sea views and planting spreading between the buildings.

The design insists on a palette of materials in a single tone — bare fair-faced concrete, bronze-colored cladding, specially developed terracotta brick — to make the campus read as one whole.

Image sources: Archdaily, Dezeen, RIBA