Short's Queen's Building, Leicester. Photo: Peter Cook

As for the chimneys - well, the Contact Theatre company had suffered for years from an airconditioning system that was so noisy it had to be turned off during performances, whereupon the audience boiled. So he was preaching to the converted. But all this is, really, beside the point. This is fun architecture for a youth theatre, an audience for whom its green credentials and (literally) over-the-top quality is just fine, set as it is in a nondescript part of the University of Manchester campus. There are witty references in the architecture if you want to find them: I liked the fact that his walls of square terracotta inlet flues at ground level, proudly expressed rather than hidden away, are made from standard chimney liners - a building component you never usually see at all.

Just as high-tech architects tend to justify their more expressive designs on a functional basis, preferring not to admit to the use of symbolism and metaphor, so even Arts and Crafts aficionados such as Alan Short like to explain the form of the Contact Theatre in terms of computer modelling and wind tunnel testing. But another architect - Hopkins, say - can use the same technology to come up with a building that looks utterly different, but does the same thing, air-wise. As always in architecture, it's horses for courses. The only sure thing is this: we'll be seeing a lot more chimneys in the future than anyone could possibly have imagined in 1960.