There is a part of Surrey that is just south of London, that is dangerously close to the "edge city" of Croydon, where run-down inter-war surburban housing rubs shoulders with the depressing half-timbered developers' offerings of recent years, plonked down into the scrubby remainders of what was once countryside. An in-between, Nowheresville kind of place. But here, the unexpected sight of rows of intriguing brightly-coloured rotating wind-catchers tell you that something unconventional is going on. They signal one of the shortlisted candidates for British architecture's grandest award, the Stirling Prize. And they might just represent the future of housing.