Laban could dance off with prize

The shimmering facade of the Laban dance centre, designed by Herzog and de Meuron, the Swiss architects of Tate Modern, was tipped yesterday to win British architecture's most prestigious award, the RIBA Stirling prize.

The multicoloured building, as exotic as a hummingbird in the post-industrial wasteland of Deptford Creek, south-east London, was immediately made 2-1 favourite by William Hill bookmakers to take the £20,000 prize.

The award is for the building which has made the greatest contribution to British architecture in the last year, and usually goes to a high-profile, high-budget project.

However, as BBC listeners were invited to vote online, the most prestigious and the most humble projects on the list emerged as their best-loved buildings.

Lord Foster's Great Court at the British Museum and a tiny shelter for passengers trying to get out of the wind while waiting for the ferry on the Hebridean island of Tiree were neck and neck at 30% of the votes each.

William Hill put the Great Court in joint second place, at 3-1, with Bedzed, a pioneering high-density, low-energy development at Wallington in Surrey. Bedzed, designed by Bill Dunster Architects, is strikingly unusual for a housing development in that it is equally admired by architectural critics and those who bought the flats and houses.

The little Scottish shelter, designed half huddled into the hillside against the prevailing winds by Sutherland Hussey Architects with Jake Harvey, Donald Urquhart, Glen Onwin and Sandra Kennedy, was made an outsider at 6-1.

The production centre and scene store for the Theatre Royal in Plymouth, built on tons of rock dumped into swampy tidal reclaimed land, and designed by Ian Ritchie with a unique squashy bronzed surface, was in fourth place at 4-1 - long odds given that it has already been the joint winner of the Royal Fine Arts Commission Trust building of the year prize.

The last building on the list, with 5-1 odds, is a London office block, 30 Finsbury Square, by Eric Parry Architects.

Eric Parry is chair of the RIBA awards group, and had to be firmly excluded from the judging sessions where his own office block made the shortlist.

However, he labelled all the shortlisted projects "great architecture", and said that they shared a strong commitment to environmental issues, regeneration and their impact on the people who lived or worked in them.

"Architecture is the most public of the arts, and the public are severe critics. Yet each of these buildings - from social housing to great public buildings of international prestige - is popular."

The jury includes the novelist Julian Barnes, Justine Frischmann, who trained as an architect but is better known as lead singer with Elastica, and Chris Wilkinson, whose firm has scooped the prize for the last two years for the Gateshead bridge and the Magna centre - but not Mr Parry.

The judges will visit all six shortlisted buildings. The winner will be decided at a final judges' meeting on October 11.