Britain's smallest royal palace; the first UK art gallery to cut its carbon emissions by almost 50%; and two transformed Victorian treasure houses are the four short-listed projects competing for this year's Gulbenkian Prize for museums and galleries. The short list was chosen from a long list of ten museum and gallery projects, which included the V&A's Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, London and the newly restored De La Warr Pavilion, East Sussex. The winner of the £100,000 Prize will be announced on 24 May at RIBA, London.

The short list of four is as follows:

• Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, Glasgow for its New Century Project
  A bold three-year £35m restoration and re-display of Glasgow's world-famous Victorian art gallery and museum. Described as “one of the greatest civic collections in Europe”, and now with some 8,500 objects on display, visitors can explore collections ranging from fine and decorative arts to archaeology and the natural world. With the priority of appealing to a wide range of audiences, a radical new approach - seen by some as controversial - has been taken to the presentation of these diverse collections, cutting across disciplines and communicating through themes and stories.
• Kew Palace, Historic Royal Palaces, London
  Visitors to Britain's smallest royal palace step straight into the world of the early 1800s when Kew was inhabited by George III and his large family. Whilst some of the palace has been re-created in vivid Georgian splendour - in often startling but authentic colour-schemes - the upper floors remain untouched, revealing rooms unseen by the public for 200 years. A carefully understated approach to conservation and interpretation, and the use of imaginative visual and sound effects, provide the visitor with fresh insights into a story of domestic intimacy, and a tragic final illness.
• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, West Sussex
  Pallant House Gallery is home to one of the best collections of Modern British art in the world, including works by Blake, Bomberg, Caulfield, Nicholson, Piper, Sickert and Sutherland. Its new £8.6m extension, designed by Long and Kentish in association with Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson, integrates contemporary design with the original Grade I listed Queen Anne townhouse. Seventeen galleries now allow the permanent collections and temporary exhibitions to be shown to their best advantage. This is the first gallery in the UK to install a geothermal heating and cooling system, cutting its carbon emissions by 40-50%.
• Weston Park Museum, Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust, Sheffield
  A £19m transformation to create an accessible, welcoming and vibrant place of culture and learning, created with the help of the local community. Weston Park Museum houses treasures that range from Egyptian mummies to a traditional butcher's shop. Fascinating histories and hands-on inter-actives bring to life the unusual treasures from Sheffield's archaeology, natural and social history and visual and decorative art collections. It attracted 55,000 visitors in the first 15 days of opening.

The Gulbenkian Prize is the UK's biggest single arts prize at £100,000. It is given annually to one museum or gallery, large or small, anywhere in the UK for excellence and innovation, regardless of its size or budget. The winner will be announced during Museums and Galleries Month on Thursday, 24 May at the Royal Institution of British Architects, London.

Last year's winner was Brunel's ss Great Britain in Bristol, whose visitor figures have since increased by 40%. Brunel's ss Great Britain has just been short-listed for the European Museum of the Year award. The winner of the first Gulbenkian Prize was the National Centre for Citizenship and the Law at the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham. In 2004, the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art won the Gulbenkian Prize for Landform - part sculpture, part garden, part land-art - by Charles Jencks, to be followed by Big Pit: National Mining Museum of Wales, Blaenafon, in 2005.