And what was new about them? Well some said that there was a novel emphasis on craft on hand- madeness

And what was new about them? Well, some said that there was a novel emphasis on craft, on hand- madeness, that rejected the factory-made aesthetic of Hirst and the YBAs. Others, more cynical, suggested that the NNR's new vision lay in their extraordinary eye for the main chance. Certainly, squeezing artists as disparate as Michael Rae-decker (who went on to win the John Moores painting prize) and Steven Gontarski into a single school seemed slightly far-fetched. Tracey's Bed - skidmarks! vodka bottles! (gasp) menstrual blood! - was the stuff of televisual dreams: yet it lost to the considered work of Steve McQueen. Was this the end of celebrity art? No, but it's a nice idea. There were other promises of change in 1999 as well, most of them probably as hollow as the Turner Prize's. The Prize is sponsored by a media company and was won, as you would expect, by the work that had attracted the most odium in the press: namely several pieces of elephant dung, coincidentally attached to some rather well-painted canvases In '99, though, something went wrong.

Perhaps the most charming of the year was a temporary structure in Cornwall where the American artist James Turrell built a low-budget building with a hole in the roof for observing the eclipse of the sun.Previous winners1991 Sackler Galleries, Royal Academy (Norman Foster)1992 Library for Cranfield Institute of Technology (Norman Foster)1993 Waterloo International Terminal (Nicholas Grimshaw)1994 St John's College, Oxford, new block (Richard MacCormack)1995 Exhibition stand for magazine Blueprint at Constructions Exhibition Interbuild (Zaha Hadid)1996 Ruskin Library at University of Lancaster (Mac Cormac (chk) Jameson Prichard1997 British Library (Colin St John Wilson)1998 Geffrye Museum, London (Branson Coates). When archaeologists of the new millennium come to excavate the art of 1999, they will doubtless dub it the Year of Tracey's Bed This will say more about the fin de siecle than they know In 1998, the Turner Prize behaved as it always had. As a clever comment on the adaptable nature of cities, Rem Koolhaas later deconstructed Hadid's work and used it as the basis for the exhibition "Cities on the Move".With all the controversy surrounding the Dome and Wembley Stadium, it's important not to overlook more modest projects. A good example is Zaha Hadid's stunning setting for the Hayward Gallery's fashion exhibition "Addressing the Century", which looked like a rocky landscape of glass and glamour. But the treatment seems clumsy and cliched when compared to the much anticipated conversion at the new Tate Modern at Bankside by Herzog de Meuron, or even Haworth Tompkins' clever thinking at the almost completed refurbishment of the Royal Court theatre.The question of what constitutes a work of architecture has been much discussed this year, with many of the most interesting projects not being buildings at all. The new stations on the Jubi-lee Line extension are fine examples of how public buildings should be.

The vast booking hall at Canary Wharf by Lord Foster is made in exquisitely cast concrete, while both Alsop & Stormer at North Greenwich and MacCormac Jamieson Prichard at Southwark have startled travellers by lining their stations in deep-blue glass.The remodelled Royal Opera House by Dixon Jones stole the architectural limelight towards the end of the year. In the spring, Future Systems celebrated the completion of two of their most ambitious projects to date. The Media Centre at Lord's Cricket Ground (below), a metal pod on legs, attracted attention and set a precedent for prefabricated modern buildings in sensitive settings. Meanwhile on the Pembrokeshire coast the same architects finished a new house for the MP Bob Marshall Andrews. The curvy building is covered in grass so its only visible feature is a glass "eye" overlooking the sea. Although other notable projects were completed outside the capital - including the Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield by Nigel Coates and the Dean Centre in Edinburgh by Terry Farrell - London has seen most of the action. After what seems like yonks of fudging and compromising, designers in Britain suddenly seem free to express themselves.

What do we have to show for it? Well, in addition to the obvious - a very big but elegant tent on the Greenwich peninsula - the list is rather impressive. Combine this with the millennium rush and lottery cash, and there have been some unique opportunities. This is a brilliant, brilliant book that is more a comment on this century than it ever had any intention of being.. The past year has been a vintage one for architecture. the modern woman is more and more a product of the plastics laboratory" ran one encomium.It was not until the 1990s that nylon was allowed back in, when Du Pont "reinvented" it with the launch of Tactel - nylon with different properties - a name they took care to trademark this time (which they failed to do with nylon) and which had none of the tacky, sweaty associations that its predecessor did. But then I was fascinated to learn that Du Pont, the company that created nylon, used to produce "both bombs and lingerie fibres".The picture research is second to none.

Beautifully put together, it gives us a fascinating insight into this fibre, its provenance and growth decade by decade.I was disappointed to learn that the name nylon came not from an amalgam of New York and London, which was one of the rumours that had always persisted (as the chemists that created it worked on both sides of the pond) but that it was a bastardisation of "no run" (even though it did run). Especially enjoyable are the advertisements pulled from the archives. These show that, right up until the Seventies, when it became a fibre non grata, nylon was heavily promoted in advertising "From the tips of her heels to the curve of her new hat ... But don't expect a coffee-table sized book - this is more of the toasted sandwich and cup of tea dimensions.The last in my batch is surely destined to become one of my favourite fashion books of all time.