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 Miralles abstracted numerous historical references into a rich variety of forms, enlacing its warm, humane spaces.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.

Finally, Hadid has found the criss-crossing trajectories (and the risk-taking client) to validate her deconstructed, sinuous forms and razor-sharp angles. The result is staggering.

5. Best Government Offices:
Caltrans District 7 Headquarters
Los Angeles
Architect: Thom Mayne / Morphosis

Thom Mayne, last year's winner of the high-prestige Pritzker Prize, has called the $190 million Caltrans offices "a very, very simple piece ofwork, designed and built in three years for absolutely no money."

Yet the result, like much of Mayne's oeuvre, is technically complex and highly evocative of its roots. For example, the 13-story, L-shaped structure sports a kinetic cladding of aluminum and glass that opens or closes based on weather conditions and solar angle. Photovoltaic cells line the south face, generating solar power for the occupants. And an outdoor lobby for public events features Motordom, a four-story work by artist Keith Donnier.

With its exaggerated structural elements and quirky façades, the building's outward image suggests the freeway culture that its owner, the state department of transportation, oversees. The result blends in with its contextin spite of its quirky self.

6. Best Expansion:
High Museum of Art
Atlanta
Architect: Renzo Piano

The magical daylight infusing Renzo Piano's recent worksat his Nasher inDallas, especiallyagain takes center stage at the expanded High Museum, alongside Richard Meier's 1983 attempt. A thousand light scoops face southward like sunflowers, or a platoon of robot soldiers, capturing and diffusing rays among the collection hanging in 17-foot-high upper galleries. The intimate piazza created by the new, bright-white structures comforts and shades visitors, in spite of their harsh aluminum and glass edges. Simple glass bridges span the gallery volumes.

Meier undoubtedly approves of the new quad on the Woodruff Arts Center campus. But while Piano respectfully maintained Meier's original design concept, the original spaces disappoint even more so today, next to the contained brilliance of the $110 million new wings.

7. Best Multi-Purpose Arts Building:
Shaw Center for the Arts
Baton Rouge, La.
Architect: Schwartz/Silver Architects

BatonRouge? That's right: Leaping well into the architectural vanguard, Louisiana's second city hired a lesser-known Yankee designer, paired him with New Orleans' talented home firm, Eskew + Dumez + Ripple, and discovered drama and pure energy.

Housing a museum, two theaters and educational spaces, the light green, banded volume of channel glass reaches up and cantilevers over a historic hotel. The architectural voids are what ignite this slumbering riverside city: Conspicuous openings at its terrace (with a Japanese restaurant), its sculptural plaza and a large slot cut right through the building itself.

8. Best Memorial:
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Berlin
Architect: Peter Eisenman

Non-architectureat its best: The Holocaust memorial by Eisenman (and, for a short time, Richard Serra) has generated considerable controversy, not so much for its unusual designbasically, an undulating field of 2,711 concreteblocks of varying heightsbut for its lack of literal reference points.

Yet here (as elsewhere), abstraction wins. The solemnity and strength of Eisenman's unadorned, hard-edged gesture is palpable at a distance; other emotions take over as one meanders through the disorienting, scary stelae. While workaday worries like graffiti have plagued the architect since the opening, this memorial is plainly built to lasta good thing, considering it was almost two decades in the making.

9. Best Housing:
Sanchinarro Mirador
Madrid
Architect: MVRDV

It's no surprise that the world's most remarkable housing block is a) a low-income public project; b) located in Spain; and c) by the Dutch trio known as MVRDV. The firm's track record of innovative, category-defying multifamily work is only a few years old, but also quite deep. Using their own research, the designers analyze market and occupant needs and create multiple solutionsthe phrase "mass customization" leaps to mindintegrated into singular structures that express internal plurality.

Sanchinarro's 21 stories define an epic void: a massive, sculpted terrace bridged over by its upper floors. Bright-orange fire stairs connect many of the 156 units to thisa nd other public areas. More to MVRDV's point, the multicolored donut comprises nine unique housing blocks, each with its own variety of apartment plans. Stone, concrete and tile façades echo the diversity of spacesand familiescontained within.

10. Best House:
Art Collectors' Residence
Toronto
Architect: Hariri Pontarini Architects

The best houses in the world are now designed in Toronto; the latest is by Siamak Hariri and David Pontarini. The sleek, materials-first modernism the designers espouse puts the world of "custom home" builders to shame.

Last year, the deliciously stoic Art Collectors' Residence garnered praise and awards by upstaging its high-end Toronto enclave with an image at once feather-light and fortified. Detailed with teak, copper and limestone, the house gently and unself-consciously melds functions with arcs and angles. These are new modernists, not ideologues. Perhaps Americans will catch on?

11. Best Hospital:
General Hospital of Ciudad Real
Ciudad Real, Spain
Architect: Ángel Fernández Alba

In the heart of La Mancha, where Don Quixote tilted at windmills, a super-hospital of some 800 beds has appeared like a mirage on the outskirts of this relatively small city south of Madrid. But this is no dream. It's the real emblem of Spain's commitment to cutting-edge, universal healthcare.

Fernández Alba is influenced as much by Finnish and Swedish modernism as by the arid, ruddy earth surrounding this sprawling city-like structure. Its roofscape and public program are serene and, at times, surrealistic in the way that medieval cities can be. Rendered in earthy tones of brick, travertine and copperand an array of mighty boulders pulled from its native landsthe hospital at Ciudad Real unites Spain's past and present as much as its land and its people.

12. Best Convention Center:
Milan Trade Fair
Milan, Italy
Architect: Massimiliano Fuksas

Seemingly knitted together by an undulating glass-and-steel canopy above its main, mile-long axis, the Fiera di Milano contains over 2 million square feet of exhibition hall, espresso bars and support program. The blobby veil of its spine contrasts starkly with the simple steel posts and boxy shapes it connects. But as he aspires to, Rome's future-focused Massimiliano Fuksas produces an architecture "of the emotions" by allowing forms that are organic (albeit computer-generated) into the artificial and often inhuman realm of the dreaded convention center. The results are strikingand, whether or not you have business to do there, definitely worth a peek.

C.C. Sullivan is a writer and consultant specializing in architecture, design and building technology. Formerly chief editor of Architecture and Building Design & Construction magazines, Sullivan has written for such magazines as SD Space Design (Tokyo), Architectural Review (London) and Progressive Architecture. Prior to that, he studied architecture at Yale and has worked for architects in New York, Madrid and Hartford, Conn.

Images (top to bottom): Courtesy of Steven Evans/Hariri Pontarini Architects; Courtesy of The Scottish Parliament, © Scottish  Parliamentary Corporate  Body 2005; Courtesy of The De Young Museum. © Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums, Herzog & de Meuron, Primary Designer, Fong & Chan, Principal Architects, Photo by Mark Darley; Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects, London; Courtesy of The High Museum, Atlanta, © Jonathan Hillyer 2005; Courtesy of Shaw Center for the Arts, Schartz-Silver Architects; Courtesy of Steven Evans/Hariri Pontarini Architects; Courtesy of the writer.