Lists. They seem to be an inevitable by-product of every approaching end of the year. As if you can only make sense of the past twelve months if they are distilled down to five or ten highlights. Yet lists have always been around – just think of the Ten Commandments. World history is encapsulated in lists, from sins and saints to medicinal plants, from battles won to the women of Don Giovanni. Long before Denis Diderot (1713–1784), there was a need for summarisation, overview and definition in order to gain an insight into the ‘Good’. As Umberto Eco (1932–2016) wrote in *The Infinity of Lists* (2009): ‘The list is the origin of culture. It is part of the history of art and literature. What does culture seek? To make infinity comprehensible. It seeks to create order – not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one confront infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogues, through museum collections, and through encyclopaedias and dictionaries.’¹ 1 Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists: an Illustrated Essay, Rizzoli, New York, 2009

A, too, felt the need for an overview. For an answer, however inadequate, to the impossible question: what, here and now, constitutes good architecture? That is why we asked around fifty young and established architects, curators, researchers, chief architects and politicians to name their top five favourite projects from recent years. This immediately yielded a new list of five insights.