Miralles is to architecture what Ted Hughes is to poetry: you could call his style "wild-man organic". He shares certain characteristics with America's Frank Gehry - author of the melting titanium forms of the Bilbao Guggenheim - and Britain's Will Alsop, who has built a wild-man government headquarters in Marseilles (the Grand Bleu), but has done nothing on this scale back home. Wild-man architecture is physical, sensual stuff - form follows luncheon, you might say. It has nothing at all to do with the thin-lipped, analysed-to-death architecture produced by the present ruling establishment of Polite Moderns.

The prevailing orthodoxy. Polite Modern emerged from the style war of the 1980s, usually, though not exclusively, in the hands of the younger generation of architects. While the war is remembered as the Prince of Wales vs the Modernists, or classicism vs tower blocks, in reality it was nothing of the kind; they'd stopped building concrete tower blocks years before Charles waded in. What did come through strongly in the 1980s was not classicism - next to nothing apart from country houses got built in that manner back then, despite all the propaganda - but postmodernism with (at its worst) its cartoon architectural motifs ransacked from history and its consequent Legoland appearance. Postmodernism (or PoMo, as the cognoscenti have it) had a short and merry life - and lives on in many edge-of-town hypermarkets and housing estates - but it never made the grade. The only two genuinely interesting PoMo buildings to be built in Britain, both in London, are Terry Farrell's Mayan-influenced spymaster headquarters opposite the Tate on Millbank, and Number One Poultry in the City of London, designed by the late Sir James Stirling. Most of the rest is trash.