LONDON.- Gateshead’s Millennium Bridge, "the blinking eye" designed by Wilkinson Eyre architects and already a local icon, has become the first bridge to win the Building of the Year award. The graceful bridge, which sweeps pedestrians across the Tyne, and swings up to allow passage of river traffic, beat high profile candidates, including the new Imperial War Museum North, in Manchester, which opens next month, and Nicholas Grimshaw’s Eden Project glass domes in Cornwall. One of the many striking features of the bridge is its self cleaning; every time it lifts, any cans of Newcastle Brown Ale littering it roll down into a container, to be collected for recycling. Lord St John of Fawsley, chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust and of the judging panel presenting the awards, said bridges had been a neglected architectural form.