The shortlist for British architecture's most prestigious award, the £20,000 Stirling prize, has just been announced.
The big news seems to be that the list includes the Scottish parliament building, designed by Enric Miralles and the Scottish firm RMJM - famous to date chiefly because it ran eye-wateringly over budget (£391m over budget, to be precise). Despite the "series of catastrophically expensive decisions" that caused this, the Stirling judges seem impressed by the end result: their citation describes the parliament as a "statement of sparkling excellence".
The other buildings on the shortlist are the Jubilee Library in Brighton by Bennetts; the Foster and Partners McLaren technology centre in Woking, Surrey; Zaha Hadid's BMW central building in Leipzig, Germany; O'Donnel and Tuomey's Lewis Glucksman gallery in Cork, Ireland; and Will Alsop's Fawood children centre in Harlesden, London.
You can read the full story here, and the nice folks on the Society desk here have even put together a gallery of the shorlist - surely a sparkling performance in its own right.
