'Blinking eye' bridge designers tipped to win Stirling architectural award

Seven architectural practices have been shortlisted for Britain's premier building design award, the Stirling prize. But one name is conspicuously absent – Lord Foster of Thames Bank.

Two of Foster and Partners' London projects, the Millennium Bridge and the Great Court at the British Museum, fail to appear on the shortlist, not because the architecture wasn't good enough – the bridge, wobble or not, is an acclaimed creation – but because they weren't entered for the prize.

The practice is going through a patch of bad publicity and feels that this might affect the views of the Stirling prize judges, who will deliver the name of the winner next month at a ceremony screened by Channel 4 at the recently opened Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, on the south bank of the Tyne.

But while Lord Foster may have temporarily consigned his work to the void, the competition still boasts quality. Four of the finalists are from the top flight of architectural design. The blinking eye Gateshead Millennium Bridge, designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects – whose Magna Centre at Rotherham won last year's competition – is the bookies' favourite.

But only just. Lord Rogers of Riverside's Lloyd's Register of Shipping, a brilliant essay in High Modernism on a site from hell off Fenchurch Street in London, is redoubtable. So, too, in very different ways, is Edward Cullinan's giant, oak-latticed peanut in Sussex known as the Downland Gridshell. This rustic experiment in bendy, unseasoned wood is just as adventurous as the Millennium Bridge spanning the Tyne. The last obvious contender, Building Design Partnership's Hampden Gurney primary school in central London, is architecturally the least radical of the four.

The remaining contenders have produced fine buildings, but they don't quite offer the dramatic pull of the others, which may make a difference to judges keen to lift the popular profile of architecture.

David Chipperfield has delivered a well conceived and spatially interesting office development in Germany; Malcolm Fraser Architects' Dance Base in Edinburgh is set out in an attractive cascade of levels; and Benson and Forsyth's Millennium Wing for the National Gallery of Ireland features large circulation spaces and a good deal of natural daylight.