Dezeen Magazine

Dezeen's A-Zdvent calendar: Ma Yansong

Ma Yansong of Beijing studio MAD is the penultimate architect to appear in this year's A-Zdvent calendar. Featured here is his blob-shaped Ordos Museum in the Gobi desert, which is clad in polished metal tiles to resist sandstorms. The firm also recently presented a masterplan for China where buildings are designed to look like mountains and public spaces overlap with the natural landscape.

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Dezeen's A-Zdvent calendar: Isay Weinfeld

Behind today's A-Zdvent calendar window is Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld, who we recently interviewed about his new monograph and exhibition in New York. We've also featured a string of impressive São Paulo residences by the architect, including a house with a floating spiral staircase made from Brazilian ironwood and a home made up of seven boxy volumes, all made using different materials (pictured).

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Dezeen's A-Zdvent calendar: UNStudio

The next letter in our A-Zdvent calendar is U, for Dutch architecture firm UNStudio. Pictured is Galleria Centercity, a department store in South Korea, and the architects have also recently completed a shopping centre in China with over 42,000 shiny silver balls attached to its facade.

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Dezeen's A-Zdvent calendar: Sou Fujimoto

Sou Fujimoto is the nineteenth architect to feature on our festive calendar. The Japanese architect, who claims to design structures "in between" architecture and nature, designed a cloud-like structure for this year's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion and previously completed a tiny wooden house built from a stack of chunky timber beams (pictured).

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Dezeen's A-Zdvent calendar: Arne Quinze

There aren't many architects whose names begin with Q, so our seventeenth A-Zdvent calendar entry is Belgian artist Arne Quinze, who built this 20 metre-high installation in Germany in 2009. Other architectural structures by Quinze include The Sequence, a canopy of tree-like forms installed outside the Flemish Parliament in Brussels, Belgium.

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Dezeen's A-Zdvent calendar: OMA

Following our exclusive interview with Rem Koolhaas last month, Dutch office OMA is the fifteenth entry to our A-Zdvent calendar of architects. Koolhaas' firm recently completed De Rotterdam, a 44-storey group of interconnected glass towers in the architect's home city, and has also built two skyscrapers in China - the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (pictured) and the CCTV Headquarters building in Beijing.

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Dezeen's A-Zdvent calendar: Winy Maas

Dutch architect and MVRDV co-founder Winy Maas is the letter M in our daily A-Zdvent calendar. The firm's projects include the Balancing Barn (pictured), a house with a 15-metre cantilever, and a shop and office complex disguised as an old farmhouse, but which actually features walls made from glass.

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Dezeen's A-Zdvent calendar: Kengo Kuma

Next up in our alphabet of architects is Kengo Kuma, the Japanese architect who has completed two contemporary art centres in France this year - the timber-clad art college and music school in Besançon and the FRAC arts centre in Marseille with a chequered glass facade (pictured).

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Dezeen's A-Zdvent calendar: Arata Isozaki

Letter I stands for Japanese architect Arata Isozaki in the ninth window from our A-Zdvent calendar of architects. Isozaki's most famous projects include the Museum of Modern Art in Gunma, but he more recently completed an inflatable mobile concert hall in collaboration with artist Anish Kapoor and the Qatar National Convention Centre, where tree-like columns support an overhanging roof (pictured).

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Dezeen's A-Zdvent calendar: Frank Gehry

G is for Frank Gehry in our seventh A-Zdvent calendar window. The American architect's Guggenheim Museum in the Spanish city of Bilbao (pictured) famously sparked a trend for cities commissioning iconic buildings as catalysts for regeneration, while other high-profile projects include his Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the upcoming new headquarters for Facebook.

See more architecture by Frank Gehry »