WINNER ANNOUNCED: RIBA President Sunand Prasad announces the 2007 Stirling Prize winner as The Museum of Modern Literature by David Chipperfield Architects!

Read about the Museum of Modern Literature here and watch videos of the entire shortlist >>

The Stirling Prize shortlist is out and while there will be those who carp that there are too many buildings outside the UK etc., Stirling remains by far the most important date in the UK architectural calendar. There is no other event that stimulates such debate about the value of architecture in this country. My gut reaction is that this is a shortlist poised between the iconic one-off and the accretive addition.

The most obviously, almost offensively, iconic is OMA's Casa da Música, a meteorite of a building fired like a mortar from Rotterdam and crash-landed on a square in Porto. What it has to do with British architecture should be obvious - Rem Koolhaas has lived in London since the 1960s, and is a major figure in this country's professional and intellectual landscape.

The other show pony on the list is David Chipperfield's America's Cup building in Valencia. It is a canny piece of stadium architecture and has been widely published. Glenn Howells' Savill Building is also in the icon category, with the overwhelming image of a building dependent on a wavy roof.

On the other side of the divide are buildings of meticulous modesty. Chipperfield's Museum of Modern Literature is an addition to a complex of buildings at the German literature archive in Marbach. Most of the building is dug into the hillside, behind minimal and beautiful concrete colonnades. Foster's Dresden Station is a comprehensive but pretty faithful rehabilitation of the eccentric original. Perhaps most modest of all, Haworth Tompkins' Young Vic Theatre still has its entrance through an old butcher's shop.

So for this year's judges it's either/or. There is no housing, no office, no public space. This year's Stirling is all about how you like your leisure attractions: raw, or overcooked with garnish.

Kieran Long is editor of The Architects' Journal, and one of this year's judges.