Orange County's ambitious Groundwater Replenishment System shows up today at the top of a list of best architecture of the '00s on the blog Mammoth. Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider is also on the list, along with Norway's seed vault and the iPhone. No, it's not your typical architecture list, as the author explains:

The unfortunate thing about year-end lists is that they often devolve into self-congratulatory displays of one’s good taste. With that in mind, allow us to state at the outset that the purpose of this list is not to preen the superiority of our taste (we’re well aware that the critics who pen those boring lists have visited far more of the relevant architecture constructed this decade than we have), but rather to share a handful of the reasons that we’re genuinely excited about the future of architecture, and to hopefully engender a bit of that excitement in a reader or two. To that end, the items on this list have been selected to represent some of the most hopeful trends which impinge upon the territory of architecture...

In fact, “favorite” might be a better way to describe this list than “best,” but we’ve stuck with “best” because it’s more fun, as you can’t argue about “favorites."

Photo by Orange County Water District