Pity the poor striplings shortlisted last night for this year’s Young Architect of the Year award. With construction sites grinding to a halt, the Poles heading back to Gdansk and bricks piling up at the yard this is not a good moment to try and convince the world you’re the next Norman Foster. Still, the nominees can at least comfort themselves that some of the greatest innovations in architecture have happened during recessions, when architects have little to do but sit back and think serious thoughts about fenestration. Think of the rise of Zaha, Koolhaas and Libeskind after the mid-70s oil crisis. The winner will be announced on October 30.

AOC
I thought this lot had already won the prize. AOC have become such established faces as one of the most promising, successful new practices in British architecture it’s easy to forget they’re still so young. So far they’ve built a garden pavilion for film director Stephen Daldry, a "house to stimulate different modes of thinking" for Alain de Botton, a performance tent for the Lift festival and a redevelopment of the main spaces of Leeds’ Royal Armouries Museum. Now they're building new buildings for primary schools in Southwark and two housing schemes for the massive Elephant & Castle regeneration in south London. Their USP is actually speaking, in depth, like human beings, with users of their buildings, with founding, non-architect partner Daisy Froud acting as resident critic and reality check to her three architect colleagues. Style is a singular mix of Day-Glo postmodernism and rustic vernacular. Favourites.

Feix & Merlin
They’ve been shortlisted for this and that and done a few interior fit outs, but it’s their canny eye for PR that’ll stand Feix & Merlin in good stead when the going gets tough. Most architects think fraternizing with the great unwashed is beneath them. This lot, though, realize that communicating is crucial to getting your ideas realised. Partner Tarek Merlin is a columnist for Building magazine; their jolly, fantastical design to beef up St Paul’s Cathedral by 50 stories (to protect views of it in a City increasingly crowded with high-rises) garnered splashes in the papers, while their first actual building - a beach hut in Mablethorpe, which won last year’s Bathing Beauties competition to reimagine the seaside classic - got them onto Channel 4 news. Don’t you be nicking my job now.

Kraus Schönberg Architects
Serious looking firm, and none the worse for that. Based in London and Germany, Kraus Schönberg have under their belt three interesting looking warehouse conversions in the area of Bradford known as Little Germany, a cubist-shaped, low-cost prefabricated home in Germany and, under construction, an apartment building in their home town Konstanz. All scream what such serious-faced architects like to call "materiality", by which jargon they mean the sensory quality of materials. They like their stone to be really stony, their concrete to ooze concreteness. Such groundedness makes a welcome antidote to the usual pie-in-the-sky theorizing of young architects as yet untouched by the business of real life.

McChesney Architects
Two years ago in Blackpool, a town not exactly renowned for its taste, Ian McChesney unveiled his elegant take on those classic but unnoticed symbols of the British seaside: Victorian promenade shelters, where old ladies gossip safe from the rain and hoodies swap cigarettes, safe from the police. McChesney's versions look like giant white beach towels surprised by a sudden westerly gust, the rippling steel fins specifically designed to catch the prevailing wind like sails, swivelling the oak benches below to shelter them from the gusts, so you can gossip/smoke in peace. Wonderful. After winning a Civic Trust award for them, he’s followed it up with panache this year, with a smooth looking large wooden park pavilion in Avenham Park, Preston, but his unbuilt designs hint at even greater talent and eclecticism. Give this man a real building! Got to be second favourite.

Hackett Hall McKnight
This firm, based in Northern Ireland, seems the most commercially savvy of the lot, with an 12-strong team and a drawing board seemingly overflowing with work, from furniture design and office fit outs to housing and retail work. I like their joint winning design for a large arts centre in Belfast: two performance theatres, art galleries and dance studios - designed like a city within a city.

Serie Architects
Not many architects can say they’re based in London and Bombay. One half of Serie, Christopher Lee, trained and teaches at the Architectural Association, while Kapil Gupta is director of Bombay's Urban Design Research Institute. Big on Hadid-ish warped planes and origami architecture, they’re poised to nab all the work emanating from India’s growing riches, already getting critical attention with their stunning Blue Frog lounge bar in Bombay, tables set in a solid sea of blue (you’ve got to see it to believe it) designed to maximize acoustic performance. Their restaurant building for the city’s racecourse, designed with columns like a forest, seems like an impressive follow up. The outsider that might just clinch it.

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