The shape of things to come

This was the year when the 1990s finally ended (a little late, but then architecture moves slowly). The Nineties were about show-off cultural buildings, ever more extravagant in their shapes, ever more tenuously connected to any purpose. They were fuelled by millennial optimism, the Lottery (in Britain) and loose change from the dotcom boom. Their unsurpassed role model was Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim. In 2003 the cultural building reached its apogee.

This year, the ultimate Nineties building, a great blue sea anemone called the Arge Kunsthaus, opened in Graz, Austria, to the designs of Peter Cook and Colin Fournier. This construction is so extraordinary that it will be an impossible act to follow, and it would be foolhardy of anyone to want to. This year also saw the opening of the Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, designed by Frank Gehry in the late 1980s, an edifice which would have started the whole extravagant-shape thing if it hadn't taken so long to build.

The opening of the Disney reminded us of an important point about Gehry that the boosters of wannabe Bilbaos tend to ignore. What makes him good is not just that he makes funny shapes, but that he is brilliant at the things that architects are supposed to be good at: the astute and creative arrangement of spaces, building materials and light to make a setting for human life. You don't get a building as good as a Gehry just by imitating his shapes - better to try something else.

If Bilbaoism is petering out, the predictable cycle of fashion might indicate a new sobriety, of white walls and plain rectangles. January 2004 could confirm this, with the reopening of Camden Arts Centre, made over by Tony Fretton. Best known for his Lisson Gallery near Lisson Grove, Fretton is a thoughtful, quiet designer, who has been biding his time while more showy architects have been Hoovering up commissions. Now he is moving to a bigger scale, having won the competition to design the British Embassy in Warsaw.

Further confirmation of the new sobriety could be found in the completion next summer of the Cistercian monastery of Novy Dvur in the Czech Republic, the masterwork of the uber-minimalist John Pawson. But it would be dispiriting if architectural evolution simply went from gaudy blob to white box and back again. There is reason to hope that the raucous creativity of the 1990s might have permanently opened up the possibilities of design. Once, architects felt obliged to work in one style for most of their lives, and most felt they had to work in the same style as one another at any one time. Now they can do anything they like. All they have to work out is what they are going to do, and why.

In 2003 the world's repertoire of architectural ideas ran from the 15,000 silvery discs that decorated the spectacular new Selfridges in Birmingham to the moss garden that surrounds the much-feted new Prada store in Tokyo, by Tate Modern's architects Herzog and de Meuron. It also included the flying concrete forms of Zaha Hadid's first major work, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, not to mention that blue acrylic anenome in Graz.

In 2004, in London, this rich repertoire will start being applied to places where ordinary people spend their lives - schools, libraries and housing - rather than to grand cultural monuments in the city centre. In Tower Hamlets, the year will see the opening of the first of a series of Idea Stores (a library by another name) by David Adjaye. Adjaye, who made his name with projects for the potentates of BritArt and fashion, will be attempting to transfer some of their stardust to Chrisp Street market in Poplar. Another Adjaye-designed Idea Store, in Whitechapel High Street, is also on its way.

In Dulwich, finishing touches are now being applied to the exotic revamp of Kingsdale School (a glum Sixties construction) by rising architects de Rijke Marsh Morgan. In Paddington, subtle additions are being made to Hallfield School, by Caruso St John, designers of the celebrated New Art Gallery in Walsall. In Plaistow, an affordable housing project is being designed by Herzog and de Meuron: from Prada to Plaistow represents a dramatic shift on the glamour register.

In 2004 we will also hear a lot about the Thames Gateway, the huge area that heads eastwards from the City to the sea, in which John Prescott and Ken Livingstone would like to see huge numbers of new homes built, to help ease London's housing crisis. Early in the year we will see the architectural proposals for London's Olympic bid, based in the Thames Gateway.

There will be other stories, including the completion of the late Enric Miralles's Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh, a project almost heroic in its budget-busting and deadline-breaking. My prediction is that the Scots will love this extraordinary building more than we do our on-time and on-budget City Hall.