Three cheers for excellent ordinary architecture. Five of the six buildings shortlisted for British architecture's annual Oscar, the 2015 Riba Stirling Prize, haven't got a trace of designer bling about them. There is a faint odour of political correctness about the selected projects, but the key thing is that most of them serve ordinary people, and ordinary daily life.

Britain's best buildings in 2015 are Burntwood School in Wandsworth, designed by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris; the Peabody affordable housing block at Darbishire Place in east London, by Niall McLaughlin; the Maggie's cancer care centre in Lanarkshire, by Reiach and Hall; the NEO Bankside luxury apartments in Southwark, Rogers Stirk Harbour; the library and teaching building at the University of Greenwich, by Heneghan Peng; and the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, by MUMA.

The Royal Institute of British Architects' judges have obviously taken the greatest care to tick a wide range of democratic boxes, and its president, Stephen Hodder, says: "The shortlisted projects are each surprising new additions to urban locations – hemmed into a hospital car park, in-filling an east London square, completing a school campus. But their stand-out common quality is their exceptionally executed crafted detail."

Only one project on the shortlist, NEO Bankside, had a big price tag, £140m. The rest were low-cost, or very low-cost, buildings. The message sent by this shortlist is a good one: that there is no reason why ordinary building types can't be well designed and well built.