When the Crystal Cathedral was constructed near Los Angeles in 1980, its design was pure Hollywood: designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee for televangelist star Robert Schuller, the design combined traditional elements of church design with features that made it suitable for television broadcasts. However, when Crystal Cathedral Ministries filed for bankruptcy in 2010, the building was passed to a very different tenant, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, who then commissioned Los Angeles-based firm Johnson Fain to adapt the building to be a better fit for the Catholic Church.

A recent article by Mimi Zeiger for Architect Magazine investigates how Johnson Fain are converting the 1980 classic into something more suitable for its new life out of the spotlight—including modulating the light within the vast all-glass structure and rearranging the seating.

Buildings, perhaps unlike any other art form or edifice, have a capacity to influence or become part of a place's cultural identity and history. Defining an architectural monument is, however, an ambiguous exercise – most of their ilk only reach this status years after completion. AD Classics are ArchDaily's continually updated collection of longer-form building studies of the world's most significant architectural projects. Here we've assembled five structures and buildings which, often aside from original intentions, embody that most ephemeral feeling: a sense of progress.

The key to quick, efficient CAD modeling is to have a solid library of CAD blocks - pre-prepared sets of common objects and details that you can simply drop into your drawing as and when they are required. Fortunately, there are many ways you can build up your own CAD blocks library without having to create all of your own objects from scratch. One of them is to purchase sets of blocks from websites like boss888.net, which has a wide array of CAD objects available for download - and is even offering a selection of their catalog for free.

A new collection of five minute-long On Design stories—developed by the team behind Section D, Monocle 24's 24's weekly review of design, architecture and craft—profile a person, survey a place, or unpack an idea that’s changing or shaping design and architecture today. We've selected fourteen of our favorites from the ongoing series, examining issues as wide as Postmodernism and the architectural competition, to five-minute profiles of Alvaro Siza, Josef Hoffman, Kengo Kuma and Superstudio.

'Tis the season for offices from around the world to send us a bit of holiday cheer! See our favorites below (or check out our reader-submitted cards).

Here’s to a wonderful, architecture-filled 2017!

Happy Holidays from the ArchDaily team!

Architects and students of architecture stereotypically never stop making, and their creative talents continue to flow irrespective of the holiday season. Our annual challenge is an unashamed way to channel the inventiveness, originality and artistry of our readers from around the world into that most humble of gifts: the holiday card. Out of the 200 submissions, these are 43 of our favorites.  

Featured gif by Rebecca Lou

Amsterdam-based Rietveld-Architecture-Art-Affordances (RAAAF) and Atelier de Lyon have revealed designs to reimagine one of The Netherland's monumental "tribute[s] to the majesty, and seemingly indestructible power, of the Dutch Delta Works." The works themselves—a network of dams, sluices, locks, dykes, levees and storm surge barriers in South Holland—have collectively been described as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. Deltawerk 1:1 is an intervention examining the practice of the preservation of cultural heritage by inserting a new structure within Waterloopbos, the former Dutch Hydrodynamics Laboratory.

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In New York City, as in many cities worldwide, residents rely on the subway system to get around. But despite its importance, there are still plenty of locations throughout the city so difficult to get to, it’ll leave you cursing, “Who designed this thing anyway!?”

Now thanks to a new game from engineer Jason Wright, you have a chance to correct the design flaws of the current system – virtually, anyway.

Last week, Richard Murphy Architects’ ‘Murphy House’ in Edinburgh was named the Royal Institute of British Architects’ 2016 RIBA House of the Year. Built into a hillside lot, the unusual site presented the architects with the opportunity to play, loading the house with an assortment of clever architectural details and mechanics, including a hidden bath in the master bedroom, folding walls, sliding bookshelf ladders and operable clerestory panels.

To capture all these moving parts in their full effect, the architect himself created a video walkthrough of the house. Check it out below.

UPDATE: Deadline extended to Wednesday, December 21st at 12:00 PM EST!

ArchDaily is looking for a motivated and highly-skilled architecture-lover to join our team of interns for 2017! An ArchDaily Content internship provides a unique opportunity to learn about our site and write engaging, witty and insightful posts.

Interested? Then check out the requirements below.

Land Lines, a new Chrome Experiment exploiting the satellite image data collated by Google Maps, allows anyone—cartographic aficionado or otherwise—to marvel at the contours of the world through gestures. Intelligently designed to detect dominant visual lines from a dataset of thousands of images, cut down from over 50,000 by using a combination of OpenCV Structured Forests and ImageJ’s Ridge Detection, users can simply "draw" or "drag" on a mobile browser or on a desktop to "create an infinite line of connected rivers, highways and coastlines."

SANAA's Zollverein School of Management and Design in Essen, Germany, is a perfect 35 meter-cube. The building's dominant presence, which is particularly striking amid its suburban context, extends to the interior spaces. The architects felt "that exceptional ceiling heights were appropriate for the educational spaces, particularly for the studio level that occupies an entire slab of the structure." Indeed, this production floor is "an unusually lofty and fully flexible space," enclosed only by the external structural walls. Photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has visited the building, which was completed in 2010, to capture a fresh view on this seminal project.

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Nikola Olic, an architectural photographer based in Dallas, Texas, has a thematic focus on capturing and reimagining buildings and sculptural objects in "dimensionless and disorienting ways." His studies, which often isolate views of building façades, frame architectural surfaces in order for them to appear to collapse into two dimensions. "This transience," he argues, "can be suspended by a camera shutter for a fraction of a second." In this second series shared with ArchDaily, Olic presents a collection of photographs taken in Barcelona, Dallas, New York City and Los Angeles.

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The Sir John Soane’s Museum is often cited as a seminal inspiration for architects of all generations. Located in London's Lincoln's Inn Fields, the house—designed by Soane (born in 1753), architect of the Bank of England—is a remarkable biographical bricolage of unique spaces, objects and ideas. Kept exactly as it was at the time of Soane's death in 1837, the museum is packed with paintings, sculpture, furniture and drawings – all curated and composed by the architect himself to "enhance their poetic qualities."

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With nearly 25 million inhabitants the Chinese city of Shanghai is currently the most populous city in the world and, in addition, has a central library system that dates back to the mid 19th Century. A new city library, designed by Danish practice Schmidt Hammer Lassen and won following a two-stage international competition, will provide 110,000 square meters of space in the Pudong District and adjacent to Century Park – the largest green space in the city.

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Brett Steele, Director of London's Architectural Association (AA) since 2005, has announced that he will become Dean of UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture in August 2017. Although American-born, Steele has since become a naturalized British citizen. He studied at the AA, the University of Oregon, and the San Francisco Art Institute respectively, before working as a Project Architect at Zaha Hadid Architects in the late 1980s and early 1990s.