1. Design as a response to disaster. Between the tsunami and Katrina - and the earthquake in Pakistan - a near-global interest in prefabricated structures, sustainable design, and pre-emptive architectural engineering was born. From levees to portable shelters, coastal marshes to floating cities , flood walls to civic infrastructure , 2005 was the year design became a practical response to natural disaster .
2. Architecture blogs. Architecture blogs have exploded in both popularity and usefulness. Pruned , Inhabitat , A Daily Dose of Architecture , even Archinect - 2005 was the year blogs replaced professors as an indispensable source for architectural thought, news, and speculation.
3. Dubai . Archigram's instant city found its newest archetype in Dubai . Dongtan, Shanghai, New Songdo City, outer Moscow - Dubai shames them all . But is Dubai the city of the future ? I would guess not; for now, though, it has everyone talking (and playing tennis in high places).
4. Google Earth. Do-it-yourself cartography was everywhere by the end of 2005. Forget MapQuest: Google Earth , TerraServer , Pointingit , Frappr - everyone now maps , and location - even psychogeography - will change forever because of it.
5. The High Line. Two guys with a random idea and some letter-writing skills turn a derelict Manhattan rail viaduct into an avant-garde public park. Something in your city that you want to see change? The saga of the High Line is worth close examination.
6. Smithson's Island. In 2005, a new island temporarily joined archipelago New York. It was Robert Smithson's terrestrial performance art piece , a landmass ritually towed round Manhattan. What's next? A new continent, sailed round the world - captained by the editors of Archinect.
7. Hotel Puerta América. If the world's top starchitects can set aside their differences and design a hotel together , then perhaps diplomacy works after all. With Madrid's Hotel Puerta América, an exciting era of collaborative architectural ambition may have quietly begun.
8. Norman Foster hits New York. Finally, New York City recognizes the existence of Norman Foster - from the Hearst Tower to Governors Island and, now, WTC Tower 2: the good Lord makes his presence felt in Empire City. I, for one, hope his visit is a long one.
9. Revenge of the high-rise . J.G. Ballard's High-Rise was finally republished last year in the UK, a book rich in architectural theory: "With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and swimming-pools, banks and junior school - all in effect abandoned in the sky - the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation." Coincidence? When the cars of France began to burn , some blamed Le Corbusier's towers . Corbu's "high-rise apartments mixed badly with something poor communities generate in profusion: groups of young, armed, desperate males. Anyone who could control the elevator bank (and, when that became too terrifying to use, the graffiti-covered stairwells) could hold hundreds of families ransom." Architectural determinism is back - and it's a riot .
10. Bartenbach Lichtlabor. An Austrian mountain village is nearly suicidal from lack of sun. So what do you do but construct a complex system of mirrors to replace that solar referent and light-up the town throughout the year? 2005: the year Man domesticated Apollo - using architectural technology.
John Jourden is an (a)rchitect and pathological thinker living in New York.