Emerging Architecture: despite still struggling to make their professional mark, young architects can be a powerful force for good.

Where can you find a Japanese kindergarten rubbing shoulders with a Sussex seaside cafe? A Dhaka apartment block mixing it with a Danish science park? Or an Australian playground nuzzling up to a meditation pavilion in the Sudan? The answers, of course, lie in this issue dedicated to the AR's Awards for Emerging Architecture, our annual distillation of the global cornucopia of young architectural talent. 'Global' has become a rather limp, corporate sobriquet these days, but the AR Awards continue to display a muscular geographic diversity, with over 400 entries from 50 countries (Azerbaijan, Latvia and Panama made their debut this year), thus consolidating their position as the world's leading awards programme for younger architects. Now in their ninth year, the Awards continue their mission of nudging emerging designers centre stage, not only through recognition in these pages, but also through an associated exhibition and lecture series at London's RIBA. Such activities expand the debate begun here and expose young architects to the glare of the public spotlight. The RIBA exhibition opens on 30 November and full details of the spring lecture series will be published in the January issue. Clearly none of this would be possible without enlightened sponsorship, so we extend our continued gratitude to Buro Happold and Interface Flor for their loyalty, discernment and deep pockets.

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As seasoned observers of the built environment, you might think we've seen it all, but we find that we are regularly stopped in our tracks by the ingenuity, humanity, wit, and, occasionally, sheer nerve of the entries. This year, the task of picking through and making sense of such an embarrassment of riches fell to Shirley Blumberg, of Toronto-based KPMB, Shuhei Endo from Osaka, Jo Noero from Cape Town and Peter Davey, the AR's former editor and founder of the Awards programme. Current editor Paul Finch deftly orchestrated proceedings as chairman. Caroline Bos of UN Studio was also on the original jury, but work commitments prevented her from participating. Instead, AR columnist and archi-viveur Peter Cook proved an obliging last minute substitute.

Though the vigour of the jury's discussions owed much to different experiences and views, all were agreed on certain decisive assessment criteria; appropriate use of materials and technology, a feeling for place, respect for context and the capacity to address environmental and social concerns. Projects had to demonstrate a clear commitment to improving human life rather than being preoccupied with the simplistic notion of architecture as an autonomous art. That being said, Jo Noero (a hard man to impress as his experience has been at the sharp end of South Africa's struggle to transform itself), felt he had to articulate his disappointment with what he saw as a lack of social consciousness in many of the entries. It raises a fundamental issue--can young architects struggling to make their professional mark still find the energy to push from the bottom up and be transformatory forces for good?

With this in mind, the projects shown here must surely give cause for optimism. They embody perceptive and provocative ways of thinking about the world and demonstrate how even young architects can make a difference to the societies they serve. In this year's role of honour, three winners shared the prize fund of [pounds sterling]15000, with a further six schemes highly commended. In addition, nine projects were commended and six received honourable mentions.

Appropriately, the trio of winners crystallise different but recurring themes of the Awards programme. In its vision of 'air trees' that temper a hot, arid climate and establish a social focus, Ecosistema's 'EcoBoulevard' in a Madrid suburb (p36) is underscored by a strong sense of environmental responsiveness. Because of their compact scale and scope for formal invention, houses are a perpetually popular Awards subject and in Chile, Frohn & Rojas experiment with layers of different materials (concrete cave, stacked timber shelving, polycarbonate shell, soft fabric skin) to create an inventive, low budget prototype dwelling (p42). Finally, emblematic of the Awards' uncanny knack of throwing up the genuinely bizarre, Taketo Shimohigoshi's quirky 'vegetation beams' (p40) are a modern take on the hanging gardens of antiquity, re-envisaged for the chaos of Tokyo.

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Though the majority of winners are new to these pages, there are also more familiar names, such as the ubiquitous Thomas Heatherwick, whose carapace-like cafe on a Sussex seafront (p50) caught the judges' eye, and Sou Fujimoto, premiated twice last year, whose House O manifests a starkly primitive beauty on a rocky coastal site (p56). They join other former winners Takaharu and Yui Tezuka, whose Fuji kindergarten is a typically delightful expression of function and, like their earlier house, conceives of the roof as a dynamic and inhabitable space. Also making a reappearance is Jurgen Mayer H., whose projects have grown in scale from his Style Park installation of 2002 to a more substantial exhibition building in a Danish science park (p62). However, its exuberantly irrational form divided the jury.

After nine years of the Awards it is now possible to get some sense of generational growth and change. Architects such as Heatherwick and Fujimoto are clearly moving up and through their truly 'emerging' phase and on to greater things, while at the same time new blood continues to refresh and energise the programme. Seoul-based Unsangdong Architects epitomise the growing vibrancy and maturity of the Korean scene, with their gallery for contemporary art (p68), while the wonderfully named Phooey Architects from Melbourne cannibalise shipping containers to create a children's activity centre (p82) that is a lively homage to the joys of bricolage and recycling. In Dhaka, Shatotto Architects' apartment block (p70) is a thoughtful study in ecologically conscious high-density living in one of the world's densest and most dislocated cities. The urban maelstrom of Dhaka could not be more different from the isolated woodland setting for Makoto Takei and Chie Nabeshima's exquisite Ring House (p64), a truly Zen experience that seems to meld into nature. Japanese houses were again well represented this year, showing a younger generation's fertile imaginings becoming flesh in a way that their Western counterparts can only marvel at and envy.

Despite the Noero caveat, a significant number of winning projects tackled often challenging social programmes. In South Africa, Austrian students under the direction of Professor Volker Giencke designed and built a vivacious pre-school (p76), a small drop in the ocean, perhaps, when considering the country's wider problems, but change has to start somewhere; while in Shenyang, Turenscape proposed a radical campus landscape of working rice paddies that aims to bridge the divide between rural and urban life. One of the most poignant projects was a memorial to the dead of the Madrid terrorist attacks in March 2004, by local practice FAM Arquitectos (p54). Memorials are difficult at the best of times, but FAM's simple, light infused structure elegantly expresses a spirit of solidarity and hope, while also demonstrating the quietly transcendent power of architecture.