It didn't. In its patrician way the BBC kept them hanging on until Monday lunchtime. The newsflash was already humming down the wires by the time the phone rang in Pimlico. Up popped the announcement: "Foreign Office Architects win competition". It wasn't death. It was glory. They're off. Again, because they have been this way before.

This couple - Alejandro Zaera Polo from Spain and Farshid Moussavi, originally from Iran - are still youngsters in architectural terms. Both are in their late thirties, and the general rule of this business is that you get only scraps to do until you're 40. But they already have one celebrated big competition win under their belt, built and functioning. That is the $200 million Yokohama Port Terminal in Japan, for ferries and cruise liners. They beat an international field to that one in 1994, only two years after setting up in business, which was disgracefully young. An exercise in highly complex landscape-as-architecture, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, it opened in 2002, the same year that FOA were selected to represent Britain at the Venice Architecture Biennale. They filled the entire pavilion with evocative images of just that one project. Now they have a more wide-ranging exhibition, "Breeding Architecture", at London's ICA opening at the end of this month (November 29), which looks back over ten years of work and now has the BBC commission as the cherry on the cake. Not bad going.