Without much introduction or fanfare, submitted here for your consideration are a dozen great building that emerged over the courseof 2005. None of these projects are, admittedly, found outside Europe or North America, and none are designed by Lord Norman Foster or Frank Gehry, the foremost architectural minds of our day.

But I make no apologies. In their defense, these buildings are quite varied, both typologically (noted for convenience) as well as stylisticallyand thematically (omitted to spare you).

In other words, there's a little something for everyone.

One caveat, however: Not all of these works actually had ribbon-cuttings in 2005, but they all became completed, occupied, usable and publishable last year.

If you haven't seen these works yet, now's the time to add them to your schedule. In their own ways, these works are defining what architecture will become tomorrow. Are you curious about our built future? Then have a look.

1. Best Civic Building:
Scottish Parliament Building (Holyrood)
Edinburgh, Scotland
Architect: Enric Miralles (EMBT/RMJM)

This is last year's best damn building, period. Not in several decades have we seen such a spectacularly mannerist display of referential organic ornament and creative space-making by one talent. That person, of course, was the late Catalonian, Enric Miralles, whose death in 2000 left his partner and wife, the gifted Benedetta Tagliabue, to finish this work.

Unlike the homes of most legislative bodies, Holyrood captures the anti-Classical and nonhierarchical nature of this Scottish institution. Miralles's swansong also employed materials and methods that make the place healthy and environmentally benign in ways truly perceptible to the eye. Miralles abstracted numerous historical references into a rich variety of forms, enlacing its warm, humane spaces. The effect is one of building a new small city in a way never quite seen before.

2. Best Museums:
de Young Museum, San Francisco
and Walker Arts Center Expansion, Minneapolis
Architect: Herzog & de Meuron

Forgive me the plural here, but Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron continue to astonish. Their work stands well above anything else produced today, giving us reasons to see anew a Minneapolis institution and a reopened destination in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

The projects provide unique parallels: The warped cube of the $70 million Walker is wrapped in a crinkled aluminum mesh, while the de Young's stacked massing is contained by a skin of perforated and embossed copper. Both have apparent blocked masses cut through with skylights, courtyards or terraces; both integrate landscaping and naturalistic forms in one way or another. And they generate drama: At the de Young, a 144-foot education tower gently spirals aloft, while in Minneapolis, a Herculean cantilever creates a memorable new entrance on Hennepin Avenue.

(Yes,I know: By omission, I've dissed New York City's MoMA, and the fine-framed views and minimalist detailing of Tokyo's Yoshio Taniguchi. But the stream of unimpressed visitors exiting its cold galleries over the last year, I believe, validates choices elsewhere.)

3. Best Tower:
Agbar Tower
Barcelona
Architect: Jean Nouvel

Now another Frenchman dreams with Dalí and Gaudí: Jean Nouvel, whose new Catalonian tower is inspired as much by the hills of Montserrat as the spires of Sagrada Familia. The architect clads the 142-meter-tall oval cylinder in two skins: a polished aluminum in earthy blues, greens and grays enclosed by 60,000 sheets of clear and frosted glass. The effect obscures and dematerializes the shaft's 4,500 windows, tie-dyed in 40 dreamlike colors. Inside, a second cylinder, slightly off center, encloses elevators and stairs: No columns to mar the 31 spaciousfloorplates within. Like the famousGaudinian cathedral, this was an epic undertaking as well, taking fully six years to build.

4. Best Factory:
BMW Central Plant
Leipzig, Germany
Architect: ZahaHadid

Finally emerging from a hermetic world of high architectural theory and startling oil paintings, Zaha Hadid built big in 2005. (Her first major building, a museum, opened to applause two years earlier in Cincinnati.) The Central Building for BMW in Leipzig gives form to the notion of modern automated manufacturing. Connecting several auto assembly buildings and threaded through with actual production lines carrying half-built vehicles, this nerve center reflects the flow of ideas, people, and components through BMW's complex.