If you need convincing of the importance of natural stone in architecture you need look no further than this year’s short list for the Stirling Awards – the highly prestigious Awards presented annually by the Royal Institute of British Architects.

This is the 18^th year the Stirling Award will have been presented when the decision about which among the six short-listed projects will receive the Award is announced on Thursday 26 September at the Awards ceremony at Central St Martins in London.

The shortlist this year is not the expected mixture of the heavyweights of British architecture as five of the six practices involved are making their debut to the Awards.

Two Irish projects among the finalists are the University of Limerick in the South (by Grafton Architects), which has made an impressive use of relatively small format Irish Blue limestone, and the new Giant's Causeway visitor centre in the North (Heneghan Peng Architects), which has used the local basalt to reflect the stone in the Giants Causeway itself, which is also echoed in the perpendicular design of the visitor centre (you can read about the project, on which S McConnell & Sons was the stone specialist, here).

In England, Astley Castle in Warwickshire (Witherford Watson Mann Architects) is a local sandstone ruin that has had a new house built inside the remaining walls without detracting from the appearance of the building as a ruin. William Anelay was the stone and conservation specialist on the project (for more about the project, read the NSS report here).

Another of the short-listed projects is Niall McLaughlin Architects’ Bishop Edward King Chapel for Ripon Theological College in Cuddesdon, Oxfordshire. It has been described by The Guardian newspaper as “… the kind of building every architect dreams of making. A jewel-like distillation of ideas about materials, light and space, it is beautifully built in hand-cut Clipsham limestone…” (Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian, 18 July).

Stamford Stone Company supplied 14,480 pieces of hand cut dog tooth walling along with radial ashlar, plinth, coping and treasury windows, all in Clipsham limestone from Clipsham Quarry Company's New Quarry.