The Observer

On the face of it, the quality of the shortlist for the Stirling Prize, which marks its 10th year on Saturday with a televised ceremony in Edinburgh, suggests that contemporary architecture in Britain is in rude good health. In some years the selection could fairly have been described as the bland leading the bland. Not this time; the judges have everything from Zaha Hadid's most powerfully sculptural work to date, in the shape of her new factory for BMW at Leipzig, by way of Norman Foster's undulating glass ribbon HQ building for the McLaren racing team, to the enormously inventive, and equally enormously costly, Scottish Parliament to choose from. In this company, O'Donnell and Tuomey's Glucksman Gallery in Cork would be a somewhat unlikely bookies' favourite were it not for the fact that this month's edition of the Royal Institute of British Architects' house magazine devotes several pages to a profile of these two architects from Dublin. The shortening odds suggest inside knowledge. The gallery would certainly be a worthwhile winner.