The Contact Theatre, as it has been known since 1972 after the youth theatre company based there, has been transformed into something genuinely fantastical. At first glance it appears to be all chimneys, giant clusters in pale brick and zinc. Being in the heart of the university campus, it might pass for a chemical research lab until you take in its other big architectural gesture: an entrance façade in the form of a stylised stage curtain, but done in rippling layers of galvanised metal, artfully lit at night. What is this place trying to say?

This is heart-on-sleeve, manifesto architecture. It is saying that ecological thinking can and should result in buildings that not only are different, but look different as well, with new shapes, new roofscapes. To this, add a romantic vision from an earlier time. For the aesthetic chosen by its young architects, Short and Associates, is a world away from today’s prevailing style of Polite Modern or its godfather, high-tech. Instead, it is spiritually attuned to the English Arts and Crafts movement, which was also mad for exaggerated chimneystacks in the hands of Lutyens, Norman Shaw, Voysey and others. That movement in turn was very aware of the precedent of Tudor and Jacobean houses with their rumbustious rooflines.

But whatever the style chosen by the architect, the £5m Contact Theatre represents a rapidly-maturing technology that is moving from the alternative to the mainstream. The Contact Theatre is a "green" building. Its forest of chimneystacks is an alternative to power-hungry airconditioning. They move air, not smoke. They want to be – and succeed in being - a new city landmark. Which means that, nearly 40 years after Coronation Street first made it an object of nostalgic affection, the chimney has returned, as an agent of cleanliness rather than pollution. It is one of a range of devices now being employed to make eco-friendly buildings (see box).