Another first is that two architects have two buildings each. Foster scores again with the curving hangar of his American Air Museum at Duxford near Cambridge, while Germany's Günter Behnisch, an honorary Riba Fellow, is picked for the dramatically crashing geometries of his St Benno Catholic Grammar School in Dresden and Landesgirokasse Bank in Stuttgart. Behnisch should by rights be building in the UK now, but lottery funding for his competition-winning Harbourside concert hall in Bristol has been withdrawn. It's our great loss. The final overseas entry is an office/studio building on Düsseldorf's "media mile" by David Chipperfield Architects, its vast hooded top-floor window looking out across the city's wharfs like a huge television screen.

We have a very rare thing, a good modern pub. It's the Quay Bar in Manchester by the architects Stephenson/Bell. If only the late architecture critic and notorious tippler Ian Nairn had lived to see it. We also have a piece of glorious, pure restoration: the 18th-century Temple of Concord and Victory in the Stowe landscape gardens in Buckinghamshire managed by the National Trust. Architects Inskip and Jenkins have turned what was a derelict heap back into a beautiful classical object in the landscape. Finally, there's the Richard Attenborough Centre in Leicester by Ian Taylor with Bennetts Associates - a small but ambitious university arts centre with an emphasis on use by the disabled.

Lottery-funded projects are now coming through and we have three of them - the American Air Museum, the Crystal Palace Concert Platform, and the Richard Attenborough Centre. This is the first big test of the lottery's much-vaunted "quality threshold".

To remind ourselves what this is all about, some of us have been to visit James Stirling and James Gowan's Engineering Department building at Leicester University. Built between 1959 and 1963, this proto-high-tech building, with its crystalline plinth and bravura tower, is the one that brought Stirling's name to world attention. Although it has been badly - in some cases, brutally - treated over the years, the Engineering building, now listed, is still a masterpiece of architectural clarity, relatively small in size, but monumental in scale and timeless in its effect. Somehow or other, every building on our shortlist must face up to Stirling's Leicester test.

You can register your opinion, too. The entire shortlist can be viewed on the Internet at http://www.riba.net/stirling, where you can take part in the public vote to be announced on the night. Alternatively, an old-fashioned ballot box is open at the Stirling Prize exhibition at the Riba. Will the result of this accord with the judges' views? We'll know soon. The 1998 Stirling Prize for architecture will be announced by Peter Mandelson, secretary of state for Trade and Industry, on the evening of November 19.

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