Stirling prize shortlist 2010: three museums, two schools, one apartment block

It is the fourth time Zaha Hadid has made the Stirling shortlist and she has yet to win, reinforcing her image as the 'nearly woman' of British architecture. Maxxi, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome, appears her best chance yet, its twisting lines 'the quintessence of Zaha's constant attempt to create a landscape, a series of cavernous spaces drawn with a free, roving line', according to the judges Roland Halbe Photograph: Roland Halbe The €150m (£126m) building in the suburbs of the Italian capital doesn't have many straight walls – possibly a problem when it comes to hanging paintings – but, as the judges say, 'this is a museum of routes and paths where the curators have to invent how to hang and place 21st-century artworks' CHRISTOPHE SIMON/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: Christophe Simon/Action images Rick Mather, the Oregon-born, London-based architect, has doubled the size of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford – the oldest in Britain – without disturbing Charles Cockerell's 1845 Grade I listed building Photograph: Andy Matthews/PR Inside, Mather's team have erected new galleries in a 'ship in a bottle' exercise, parts of which appear to have been drawn by Escher Photograph: Andy Matthews/PR David Chipperfield, who was awarded the Stirling prize in 2007 for another German museum , is expected by many to repeat the feat. This time he is nominated with Julian Harrap Architects, for their €200m (£168m) reworking of Berlin's Neues Museum, which was originally built in 1859 to show off the Prussian empire's archaeological and scientific prowess Photograph: Christian Richters/PR Much of the project was about restoration, and the main new material is precast concrete. 'Understated beauty,' says the RIBA. 'Less is indeed more.' Photograph: Joerg Von Bruchhausen/PR Architects Patrick Theis and Soraya Khan built this tower of four flats, an art gallery and an office in the fashionable east London area of Shoreditch. Their own home is on the top three floors Photograph: Nick Kane/PR The project took 10 years to complete. When pictures were published of this staircase in the trade magazine Building Design, some readers worried about its apparent lack of handrail – though one can just be seen on the left Photograph: Nick Kane/RIBA De Rijke Marsh Morgan have clad an extension to the Clapham Manor primary school in London in multicoloured glass, but it is the inside of the building that got the judges excited Photograph: Jonas Lencer/PR There are no traditional corridors; instead the students either move through adjoining spaces or use the central gallery to access classrooms Photograph: Jonas Lencer/PR Christ's College school in Guildford was once fire-bombed. Now it boasts a £14.4m extension by DSDHA - the firm of sometime TV architecture pundit Deborah Saunt and her partner David Hills. Hopefully it won't happen again Photograph: Helene Binet/PR The pine-clad atrium is 'nothing like a sauna', declared the judges, it's 'the true heart of a fine building where the architects seem to have thought of everything' Photograph: Helene Binet/PR