The geographical location of this island is frequently mirrored by a cultural isolation in which there appears to be little or no awareness of developments elsewhere in Europe. Hence the widespread welcome which should be extended to an exhibition currently running at the Office of Public Works's Dublin headquarters.

This show ought to be seen by anyone interested in contemporary architecture. It should certainly be made compulsory viewing for elected members and employees of the state's local authorities who are responsible for urban planning and development, if only to let them see just how very limited and inadequate many of their interventions in this field have been to date.

Continuing for the next five weeks, the OPW's show is of the winning designs for the 2001 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, otherwise known as the Mies van der Rohe Award. A biennial event established in 1987, the prize's purpose, according to its own rules, is "to detect and highlight such works . . . whose innovative character acts as an orientation or even a manifesto." Mies van der Rohe's own Barcelona Pavilion is taken as being a symbol of this work.

It must be a matter of regret, especially among this state's architects, that Ireland is unrepresented among the 37 winning designs - in fact, Spain and Portugal seem to be particularly strong, along with Holland, Germany and England.

It is tempting, but probably unhelpful, to speculate why Ireland failed to secure even one entry in the final line-up, especially since it was included in previous years. But a more helpful exercise would be to examine the winners and see what lessons might be learned from such a process.

The most immediate response to a survey of the jurors' selection is that they clearly appreciated simplicity of design and materials. The 2001 award, for example, was presented to Spaniard Rafael Moneo for his Kursaal Centre in San Sebastian in northern Spain.

Kursaal is a German word for casino and the original building bearing this name was erected in the city in 1922 before being demolished just over half a century later. Moneo was presented with the same site, a triangle of land backing on to a thoroughfare between the sea and the river, and responded to this by proposing what the jurors have called "the powerful image of two beached rocks".

One of these blocks holds an auditorium, the other a congress hall, while beneath the pair is a wide range of other facilities ranging from exhibition halls to restaurants. But it is the two "rocks" which make the strongest impression, thanks to their construction, in which steel skeletons have been clad inside and out with special laminated glass.

During the day, this results in the buildings having a dark, dense mass on the landscape, but at night, when lit from within, they are transformed into massive luminous gems illuminating the surrounding water. To quote again from one of the jurors, "this dazzling work shows that architecture is fuelled by ideas."

The purity of Moneo's design is matched by that of another entry which was presented with an Emerging Architect Special Mention award: the Kaufmann Holf AG Distribution Centre in Bobingen, Germany, designed by Florian Nagler.

It is hard to imagine a structure with a more mundane function - a warehouse for the storage, finishing and commissioning of glued laminate elements. But Nagler's structure shows that the structure need not be as pedestrian as its purpose.

Designed and constructed in just five months, it is a cathedral-like building in which a frame made, appropriately enough, of glued laminate battened columns, is sheathed in a transparent facade made from impact-resistant polycarbonate sheeting, sections of which can be lifted to provide access to the interior.

As the citation observes, "the resultant building is not only extremely functional, but of one piece with regard to materials, construction and detailing." Like the Kursaal Centre in San Sebastian, the distribution centre appears to possess an unexpected serenity arising from an understanding of how light and space can be used. In both instances, while the buildings are extremely practical and liable to heavy usage, their architects have not felt the necessity to overload the design with excessive elements; the purity and scale of the work proves to be sufficient.

Elsewhere in the OPW's exhibition, the same lesson is apparent among the examples of domestic architecture featured.

Inevitably, most of the winning entries are public buildings which have already garnered widespread attention, such as the new Embassies of the Nordic Countries and the refurbished Reichstag Building, both in Berlin, along with the Jean Nouvel's courthouse in Nantes and Henning Larsen's Unibank Headquarters in Copenhagen.

But at a time when the provision of well-designed private housing is the subject of intensive discussion in this country, given the shockingly poor quality of much which has been built in recent years, instances of good work in this field merit particular study.

Tempting as it might be to imagine that we are the only country suffering from a superabundance of poorly designed domestic buildings, there is no doubt that this a problem throughout Europe and that the developments featured in the OPW show are continental-wide exceptions.

However, despite this caveat, they do show that both high-rise and high-density need not result in low aesthetic values. A housing complex at Innsbruck in Austria, designed by local practice B&E Architekturburo, manages to pack on to a small site almost 300 apartments in six blocks up to seven storeys high. Demand for high ecological standards means that all units in the complex have energy savings for their heating which amount to approximately 70 per cent compared to the equivalent conventional dwellings.

Just as interesting to examine is a much smaller scheme of ten houses built on a plot of land in Matosinhos, Portugal. A terrace of single-storey, flat-roofed homes separated by parallel walls and each with its own swimming-pool and annex, it shows that a certain flair can be brought to even the most seemingly mundane development, provided the architect - Eduardo Souto de Mouro - responds to the specifics of location.

In a rather more spectacular fashion, the same is also true of an apartment building designed by Cino Zucchi for a corner between two canals in Venice formerly occupied by an industrial plant. The challenge here was to acknowledge the architectural heritage of the city without succumbing to pastiche, and this Zucchi managed to do in an elegantly understated fashion.

His work is an instance of urban regeneration at its best, making a statement without making a fuss or indeed a mess of the opportunity.

In fact, a shared characteristic among the award winners is a lack of fuss or excessive display, as though the architects involved were fearful of any accusations of vulgarity. Regrettably, the same could not be claimed for much new building work here in Ireland and this is one reason why there are no Irish names to be found in the OPW exhibition.

The European Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe Award 2001 is on display in the Atrium of the OPW, 51 St Stephen's Green, Dublin until September 20th. Tel: 01-647 60 00.