So how does all this shake down, round where you live? This year's Stirling Prize shortlist is the most varied yet. Foster is conspicuously absent, though much he cares - he has just won the £90,000 Praemium Imperiale architecture award for his work over the years. It ranges from the smart City suit of Rogers' Lloyd's Register of Shipping building, to the lovably rough yet structurally advanced Downland Gridshell, a timber-lattice workshop building by Edward Cullinan Architects in Sussex which is astonishingly good. Real architecture which springs from almost pure engineering (Buro Happold being the structural engineers in this case), just as much as any Norman Foster building. If there is any justice, which there usually isn't, this one should win the Stirling Prize hands down. It is not a meringue, or a funny shape for its own sake, or a fashion statement. It is alive, creaking gently and rather reassuringly as its joints flex in the sun and wind of the Sussex Weald. And when did you last see a good, modern rural building in England that takes a serious look at new ways to use timber - in this case very long lengths of jointed green oak assembled as a double gridshell? That means that it starts off as a flat mat perched high in the air on jacks, and is then lowered to assume its final, computer-determined, shape.
But there are other contenders. Malcolm Fraser's ingenious Dance Base in Edinburgh, emerging from the hillside below the castle, squares up to Benson and Forsyth's bastion-like Millennium Wing to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. BDP's mould-breaking multi-level Hampden Gurney primary school in London has to compete against Wilkinson Eyre's "opening eyelid" bridge in Gateshead and an office building in Germany by David Chipperfield, king of the pure rectilinear shape and thus a hero of the Right Angle Club. So it's all there, all the stylistic tics, all the functional and aesthetic moves of today's mainstream British architects. And is there anything, even one little thing, that all these goodies on the architectural patisserie-counter have in common to tell us what is going on? If only.
Venice Biennale website: www.labiennaledivenezia.net/gb/archi/Next
Stirling Prize website: www.ajplus.co.uk/riba2002
