Once a year, the whole world looks to the Nobel Center in Stockholm, Sweden to announce the Nobel Prizes. The center recently announced plans to relocate to a new building, and out of 140 architects, 12 have been selected to compete to design the new home of the Nobel Foundation and its related cultural and educational activities. Notable designers include OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, BIG, and David Chipperfield Architects. The majority of the selected applicants were from Europe and Scandinavia, with only SANAA's Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa chosen from outside the region. The Nobel Foundation's new building will incorporate areas for digital media, museum exhibitions, meetings, scientific conferences, a library, a cafe, and a shop. The architects have been asked to consider both the site's historical content and the natural environment in their plans. Each of the twelve firms will be expected to establish a close working relationship in cooperation with the client over the course of a very lengthy planning process. "The competition will begin once the majority of the project's financing has been secured. Encouraging discussions are currently on-going with several donors, and we are confident that we will secure the necessary financing to begin the architectural competition and carry out the project during the current calendar year." says Lars Heikensten, Executive Director of the Nobel Foundation. On December 1, 2011, the Nobel Foundation and the City of Stockholm signed a declaration of intent to work jointly towards the creation of a permanent Nobel Prize Center, to be located on Nybroviken, an inlet of the Baltic Sea in the heart of Stockholm, Sweden. They have agreed on a site on the Blasieholmen peninsula that is owned by the City of Stockholm.

Social networking site Facebook is to build its first data centre outside the United States in the northern Swedish town of Lulea, awarding an initial construction contract of US$ 121 million, reported Reuters. The data centre, set to be the largest of its kind in Europe, will take advantage of the climate in Lulea, among the coldest in Sweden, to cool tens of thousands of servers. Swedish construction group NCC said it was part of a joint venture with two U.S. companies, DPR Construction and Fortis Construction, which had won a contract of US$ 121 million for the first of three server buildings in the data centre. The data centre will be the northern most of its size on Earth. It is Facebook's first in Europe and will serve more than 800 million site users. Facebook said in a statement it chose Lulea, despite its remoteness some 1000 kilometers north of Swedish capital Stockholm, because its cold climate would be good for cooling and that it could provide environmentally friendly hydro-power. The three server buildings will have an area of 28,000 square meters each. Construction takes place in three phases and begins instantly. The first building is to be operational within a year and the entire facility is scheduled for completion by 2014.

Creative artists from all over the world arrived to Swedish Lapland to create the largest Ice Hotel in the world. The winter season 2010/2011 will be the 21th for the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjarvi, Sweden. The idea of Ice Hotel was born in 1990's; Jukkasjarvi has been always attracting ice carving artists, as it is located beyond the Arctic Circle. One winter day in 1990, when French artist Jannot Derid was holding an exhibition of his ice carvings in the igloo (a snowhouse originally built by the Inuit) , the number of visitors turned to be larger than it was expected and lack of available rooms forced some of them stay in that igloo at night. Locals covered blocks of ice inside the igloo with reindeer skin and let visitors sleep on them, inside their sleeping bags. In the next morning, the visitors, who spend the night in igloo, were enthusiastically speaking about the "magic" opportunity to sleep inside the ice shed and also clamed that it was not cold inside at all. In the second half of November, when in Jukkasjarvi temperature drops, locals scrape tons of ice blocks and snow from nearby Torne River. This year merely 22 tones of snow and ice was used to create the Ice Hotel on 5500 square meters area. Main bearing columns are equipped with steel rods from inside, which help to prevent them form collapse. These columns are created by spraying snow on the steel construction and allowing it to freeze into rock solid mass. Then, ice walls are built around the columns and large blocks of ice are placed inside the rooms, to let the artists to carve on them. The construction works continues for at least one month. Usually the Ice Hotel is completely ready at the end of December, but this year visitors can admire a real "Ice Miracle" from the beginning of the month. The guests can stay in any of 60 rooms, and also visit the ice church, bar, Art Suits and etc. The price for per night stay in world's original and largest Ice Hotel starts from $458! Yes, it's not cheap, but given the fact that it takes one month work of 50 skilled artists, and soon in Spring the hotel will melt back into the Torne River, the price is quite acceptable. Well before the opening of the next Ice Hotel-tourist season, Jukkasjarvi invites everyone to special snow carving lessons.