It did not win in the end, though it came very close indeed - so close that the Stirling jury made it the official runner-up at the announcement on November 19, the first time this has happened. Of course, this makes it all the more perplexing that it was very nearly ruled out of contention altogether. But as luck would have it, it had to face an extraordinary rival, and this was not Lord Foster's Berlin Reichstag, though that was prominently on the list.

The Media Centre at Lord's cricket ground, by architects Future Systems (Jan Kaplicky and Amanda Levete and their team) is a building as different from the mainstream as the Museum - but in what is, to fashion-conscious architects, the more acceptable "high-tech" mould. To describe it as a "pod on stilts" is to do it an injustice, since this expressive ovoid aluminium capsule very cleverly resolves the geometrical and visual complexities of the home of cricket. It is an eye on the game, a piece of equipment as much as a building, made in sections by boatwrights rather than builders.

Kaplicky and Levete are also deserving winners because they have struggled so hard for so long on a sequence of visionary buildings that never got built: now they are at last building for real, but they are scarcely wealthy. At first they intended not to turn up at the award ceremony in Glasgow, because of the cost of the trip from London. They may well also have feared disappointment after the let-downs of the past, but these are people for whom the £20,000 prize will make a real difference - and it is such people, rather than multi-millionaire establishment figures, that the creators of the Prize had in mind. I know that, because I was one of them. This year - which was so nearly disastrous for the Stirling - therefore turns out to be a vintage one. But it was a damned close-run thing.

NatWest Media Centre: handbuilt by boatwrights

• More on the NatWest Media Centre by Future Systems
• More on the Museum of Scotland
• Last year's Stirling Prize