The City of Westminster, England has announced the shortlist for its first People’s Choice Award for the city’s best building from the past decade.

In an effort to engage the public in a debate about what makes a great building, the Westminster City Council asked a panel of architects, developers, councilors, and planners to shortlist 12 designs to be voted on by people who live and work in the city, as well as by visitors. Buildings for the shortlist were chosen based on its use of materials, purpose, and impact on the surrounding space.

"Brilliant architectural design should be recognized for all the fantastic benefits it can have in terms of health and wellbeing, sustainability, and the simple pleasure we all take from having such striking buildings lining our routes home, to shop and to work," said Cllr Robert Davis MBE DL, Deputy Leader of Westminster City Council. "The best people to ask about the impact these buildings have are those who see them day in, day out, and so I am delighted that we have been able to engage the public in a debate about what makes a great building and to promote design excellence."

The 12 shortlisted projects for the Westminster People’s Choice Awards are:

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The London School of Economics (LSE), working alongside the RIBA, has announced six teams in the running to design their latest high-profile building project: the £100 million redevelopment of 44 Lincoln's Inn Fields, which once complete will be known as the Paul Marshall Building. As the third of the LSE's recent run of major campus transformations, the Paul Marshall Building will follow in the footsteps of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners' “Center Building Redevelopment” which received planning permission earlier this year and O'Donnell + Tuomey's highly-acclaimed Saw Swee Hock Student Centre, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Stirling Prize. Read on to see the full shortlist.

Five projects have been selected as finalists of the 2015 EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture- Mies van der Rohe Award. The finalists were selected from a shortlist of 40 projects, and over the next couple of months the jury members will visit each of the finalist projects to evaluate the buildings firsthand and gather information from the people who use them. On May 7, the architects will present their projects to the jury. The winner will be announced the following day at a ceremony at Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion.

See the five finalists after the break.

When Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey, who practice in partnership as O'Donnell + Tuomey, were named as this year's recipients of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, a palpable collective satisfaction appeared to spread throughout the profession. No one could find criticism in Joseph Rykwert and Níall McLaughlin's nomination, nor the ultimate choice of the RIBA Honours Committee, to bestow the award upon the Irish team. Their astonishingly rigourous body of work, compiled and constructed over the last twenty five years, has an appeal which extends beyond Irish and British shores. A robust stock of cultural, community and educational projects, alongside family homes and social housing projects, leaves little doubt about the quality, depth and breadth of their mutual capabilities and the skill of those that they choose to collaborate with.

Read the conversation with the Gold Medallists after the break.

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has selected Irish architects Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey as recipients of the 2015 Royal Gold Medal, one of the world's most prestigious lifetime achievement awards for architecture. Approved personally by the Queen, the award recognizes those who have made a significant contribution to the advancement of architecture.

The RIBA praised the way O'Donnell + Tuomey came together in the early 1990s to combine "Sheila’s quiet, studied 'rationalism' alongside John’s fluent, rhetorical 'constructivism,'" commenting that "through their buildings, publications, exhibitions and teaching they have forged a confident new identity for Irish architecture."

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