Build it – and the photographers, with their drones and digital SLRs, will come.
These incredible pictures all made the top 50 in a contest called #Architecture2020, run by photo app Agora, which asked photographers to send in snaps of their favourite architectural wonders.
In total 10,367 photos were submitted from snappers across the globe, with judges whittling them down to 50 finalists. After that, it was all down to Agora users, who were tasked with selecting the overall winner.
And what a bountiful supply of top photography they had to choose from – jaw-dropping images of beautiful bridges in Vietnam and Bristol, mesmerising photos of incredible cityscapes in China and Spain and fairy-tale castles in Germany, to name but a few.
Octavi Royo, Agora’s CEO and co-founder, said: ‘#Architecture2020 is a spectacle about the beauty that results from the interaction between light and volumes. The contrast between chaos and order, nature and the artificial, matter and emptiness.’
Scroll down to see MailOnline Travel’s pick of the most brilliant pictures in the contest. You’ll find the overall winner at the very bottom…
A fairy-tale-like image of Eltz Castle in Mayen-Koblenz, Germany, was taken by German @moodfella, who titled the shot ‘Castlemania!’
This Buddhist ‘stupa’ in Myanmar was captured by Min Zaw, who’s from that country. He explained: ‘Stupas are one of the most recognisable forms of Buddhist architecture. It generally takes the form of a hemisphere, although this shape may vary by country. Pilgrims worship at a stupa by walking around its base outside, usually in the clockwise direction. The massive crack in the middle of this stupa was caused by an earthquake’
The incredible 1,621ft-tall Shanghai World Financial Center, known as ‘the bottle opener’, captured by Russian photographer Vitaly Tyuk, also known as @panvelvet
An aerial shot of Thanh Hóa village in Vietnam by local @thanhtoanphotographer looks like a colourful patchwork quilt
Russian snapper @inchaseofbeauty says of his shortlisted shot: ‘Here’s one of Moscow’s courtyards from above. There are different areas to work out, play with the kids, or even play table tennis. I arrived at this place too early, so I decided to wait for a few hours. I wanted to see sunlight on the ground in the best position’
This tropical, tree-top paradise set amid lush vegetation in Tulum, Mexico, was captured by Canadian photographer @blakehobson
Italian photographer @lucacornago took this hypnotic image of Neuschwanstein Castle in Schwangau, Germany. It was a shoot he would long-remember: ‘My hands were frozen because of the freezing wind, but it was all worth it to see such an epic sunset. The architecture of this castle is stunning. It reminded me of my childhood and Walt Disney’
This stunning – but shocking – image by Venezuelan @donaldobarros shows packed living conditions in Petare, a city in a district of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela
This incredible water feature in Singapore’s Changi Airport looks like a spaceship. It was photographed by Malaysian @siang425, aka Andy Huan
A floating fort in the Baltics snapped by Russian @nikybwd, who explains: ‘Fort Alexander 1 is a naval fortress on an artificial island located in the Gulf of Finland, near St Petersburg and Kronstadt. From 1899 to 1917, the fort housed a research laboratory on plague and other bacterial diseases. By 1983, the fort was stripped of its fixtures and abandoned. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Fort Alexander was a popular location for rave parties’
British snapper @tom.bridges took this atmospheric aerial shot of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, and explained: ‘Once or twice a year the weather conditions produce this amazing scene of the fog passing under the suspension bridge. I’ve lived next to this bridge for two years, but I never managed to capture the image. Within a month from moving house, and living over an hour away, the conditions looked to align. So I traveled down three days in a row and on the final day managed to get it!’
The iconic Flat Iron building in New York has beguiled photographers for decades, and here Norwegian @øystein went for an atmospheric black-and-white look
British photographer @leemumford8 took this stunning shot of Barcelona. He said: ‘I wanted to get up high and show the unique pattern from a different angle. It’s beauty that can be hard to imagine from the street level. This was an early start, to capture the magical city under some nice morning light. The previous days before this shoot it was cloudy, so I waited for a clear day to capture the light kissing the buildings’
A vividly-coloured apartment block in Singapore was captured by Singaporean @jaywu10, who managed to add the block’s reflection in a giant puddle at the bottom of the shot
This incredible shot of Pahtotharmyar Temple in Bagan, Myanmar, was expertly captured by local Aye Chan Tun, who explained the patience needed to get the perfect shot. ‘Every day, novices living near the temple pay their homage to the Buddha statue. The photo required a meticulous organisation because the sun shines through during a very short moment,’ he said
Indonesian photographer @chaksproject captured this aerial shot of the amazing ninth-century Buddhist temple Borobudur in Magelang, Indonesia. The Unesco-listed temple is decorated with 504 Buddha statues, while 72 Buddha statues surround the central dome
This superb picture of New York’s eye-catching Vessel building was taken by German ‘Katharina I’. The hexagonal panels give the structure an other-worldly feel
Spanish photographer Alvaro Valiente captured this image when he was travelling around Tokyo. He said: ‘This building looks like another building from the outside, but if you head inside it’s an explosion of colours! It was such a great discovery. I want to transmit the same feeling, an explosion of joy and colour in the eye, and the harmony between that chaotic colour range and the straight, leading lines of the building’
On his travels to the UK, Kiwi photographer @bear.martin snapped Arundel Castle at night to stunning effect. He explained: ‘I have been experimenting with light painting, and I thought this folly built in 1787 would make a great subject to be painted. This photo was taken at 8pm on a very dark but clear winter’s night. The mini-castle was lit using a drone with two Lume Cubes [portable lights] circling the structure, which were then removed in post-processing’
This gorgeous image of the Emperor William Monument in Porta Westfalica, Germany, was taken by German photographer Marian Flessa
Russian snapper @poletaev.photo called this shot of Ostankino district in Moscow simply ‘Low Fog In Moscow’. He explained patience was the key when capturing something so rare: ‘Low fog sunrises are not so commonly seen in Moscow. I woke up around 3am and saw the fog outside my window, so I decided it was a good moment to fly my drone. The fog was very dense, so I didn’t even see the tower itself from my vantage point. But when I got my drone back, I saw this striking picture – a thin sky needle above the sea of fog, with a shadow that makes it endless. It was the best sunrise of that summer’
This almost haunting image was captured in Crimea by Russian photographer Artem Pikalov, who titled it ‘Lonely House’. He said: ‘I wanted to convey the peace of being in such a secluded place in solitude. In the current bustling rhythm of life, it is sometimes important to spend time in silence, disconnecting from gadgets and social networks. On the day I took this photo, I found out that I would finally become a dad!
Vietnamese snapper @trantuanviet’s photo ‘Golden Bridge’ gathered the most votes on the Agora app, earning him the #Architecture2020 Hero title and the $1,000 top prize. Describing his winning entry – which features The Golden Bridge in Bà Nà Hills resort, near Da Nang, Vietnam – he said: ‘The Golden Bridge has been built at around 1,400 metres (4,593ft) above sea level. It is divided into eight spans (the longest one is equal to 20m), with a total length of 148.6 metres (485ft). This impressive architecture work has the peculiarity of being held by two giant concrete hands, representing the Mountain God’s hands’
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