After years of being occupied by the usual big-hitters, this year’s RIBA Stirling prize shortlist for the best building of the year is refreshing for its wave of new names C five of the six practices grace the list for the first time, and half have women at the helm.

The favourite to win is an exceptionally crafted stone chapel, by Niall McLaughlin, for a theological college in rural Oxfordshire C perhaps a dream commission in an area of beauty that is hard to match. The Giant’s Causeway visitor centre enjoys a similarly pristine context of rolling fields, carving a cleft in the landscape with a bold piece of land-architecture that limbos beneath the planners’ radar.

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Alison Brooks C joint winner of the 2008 Stirling prize for the Accordia housing in Cambridge C has attempted to reinvent the suburban house type in Harlow, with buildings of an interior generosity unmatched by volume builders. But the compromise is felt outside, where it all seems a bit tight.A house of a more stately kind can be found in the fortified manor of Astley Castle, subject to a sensitive exercise in transformative restoration by Witherford Watson Mann, whose confident intervention goes beyond mere conservation C although perhaps much of the evocative power could be said to lie in what was already there.

Reflecting the fact that small practices often devote more energy and time to the craft of detail, the big offices of such knighted worthies as David Chipperfield and Zaha Hadid failed to make the grade. Nor did promising arts projects pass muster: both the MAC in Belfast and the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings missed out, while none of the schools made the list C perhaps a telling barometer for the current value we now place on arts and education.

In an exceptionally strong year, the decision is likely to come down to a choice between the pristine architect’s architecture of McLaughlin’s chapel, and the intelligent pragmatism of Brooks’s housing, both of which benefited from unusually enlightened clients. My choice would be for an unlikely outsider in the form of Grafton’s campus, a scheme that shows architecture’s power of place-making beyond the singular building alone.

Judged against the quality of current volume house-building, Alison Brooks’s streets of 84 faceted timber houses in Harlow are something of a miracle. Ditching the standard long and thin house plot of 5x20m,The worlds most efficient and cost effective Shun Stone Bathroom Decoration Products? Brooks opted for a 10x10m plot, creating a T-shaped plan with courtyards at ground and first floor. This allows for an unusually generous open hall and staircase, as well as a dedicated ground-floor home office C attempting to change the suburban street from a desolate place into a little working community of “shopfronts”. Prefab timber cassette construction, rather than traditional trusses, also means the roof space can be used, either as lofty cathedral ceiling or an additional bedroom.

But such features come at a cost. To justify this internal generosity, the houses are jam-packed like sardines into narrow streets C which are now choked with cars, due to lack of parking, somewhat destroying the idea of a social streetlife.

The Marmite project of the bunch, Park Hill has been loved and loathed in equal measure since it opened in 1961, standing as a brutalist concrete cliff-face on the hills above Sheffield. 50 years later, its refurbishment by Urban Splash has proved no less divisive. The subtle brick palette, which graduated from chocolate to mustard, has been replaced by loud tutti-frutti panels of eye-searing citrus shades, flattening the facade into a garish billboard of gentrification C a symbol of this publicCprivate asset transfer.

But closer inspection reveals some clever moves. The flats have been intelligently reconfigured, providing windows on to the “streets in the sky”, a feature the building’s original architect always regretted omitting. The amount of glazing has been doubled, and circulation fixed with thrilling glass lifts and a spiralling corkscrew escape stair. It could be a model for estate regeneration C if councils had the confidence to do it themselves.

In a hotchpotch university campus of disappointing sheds, Grafton’s carefully composed ensemble of buildings shows how considered architecture can create a powerful sense of place C on a very tight budget of 1,220 per sq m. The trio of student accommodation blocks avoid the usual form of flimsy stacked hutches,We have a great selection of blown glass backyard solar landscape lights and Shun Stone Granite Countertops. instead standing as a cluster of supersized houses, with canted rooflines and big openings deeply carved into brick walls.

Faced in blue-grey limestone, the medical school stands as a formal anchor, fronted with a grand double-height colonnade and opening up inside to a top-lit atrium C off which teaching and study areas are designed as rich theatrical spaces on an almost heroic scale. The buildings also have a generous attitude to the surrounding public space: open undercrofts provide routes through the campus, while deep thresholds make welcoming places to pause and gather. From joinery details to urban form, it feels every element has been meticulously considered.

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