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Architectural Review has announced four principal winners for its annual design prize and, boy, they do not disappoint. Expanding the reach of a typical architecture honorarium, one of the winners is not even a building but a single entry into an edifice, aka a door. Brilliant! Now let’s see the goods.

The Emerging Architecture Awards, sponsored by design consultants Ramboll and Austin-Smith:Lord, “celebrate the best pieces of design by young architects from across the world.” Besides The Door (see below), one of our favorites is an inventive plan for a friary in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Designed by ODOS Architects, the refurb unites friary and church with a new residential cloister. Those are some seriously lucky monks, and not just because they get to live in a place called Knocktopher.

Now this is where we freak out over the precious, elusive fulcrum where form balances function. Matharoo Associates designed some showboat mansion for a design merchant in India and came up with this ingenious rendition of a front door.

Courtesy of our pals at Fast Company, we know that:

The door is a whopping 17 feet high and five-and-a-half feet wide, and comprises 40 sections of Burmese teak, each of them nearly a foot thick. Each section revolves around some pretty complex machinery: The door’s single pivot hides a counterweight, 80 ball bearings, and 160 pulleys which all work together invisibly. Push on any one plank, and all 40 sections reconfigure themselves into a sinusoidal curve, revealing an opening into the house.

Other nominees include a sports research center in Spain whose “eerily perfect geometry suggests something not of this world,” and creek-spanning school building in a remote region of China.