This happens all the time in architecture: there are Tesco superstores that try to look like Norman Foster’s Stansted Airport, there’s a Homebase and about two dozen other buildings that poach Jim Stirling’s famous leaning and curving glass wall at Stuttgart’s 1986 Staatsgalerie. As soon as a design of any merit or originality is published – and the Rogers one dates back to 1989 – it takes on a life of its own.

Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart: Stirling Wilford

The 1990s will be remembered as the decade of the wavy roof. But by no means all of them are rip-offs of Rogers. Indeed, the wavy roof idea existed before Terminal Five was conceived: one need only to look at the earlier designs for Japan’s Kansai airport by Rogers’ former partner Renzo Piano. And Richard MacCormac’s Cable and Wireless College in Coventry - its wavy roofs clad in a net of green faience tiles, like jade armour – was designed at the same time Rogers was making curvy lines on his drawing board. Call it morphic resonance, if you like: suddenly everyone gets the same idea. Or reads the same magazines, perhaps.

Kansai Airport, Japan: Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Every fashion collection on the catwalks of London or Paris or Milan or New York shows the same tendency: word gets around, people share a mood, a particular "story" tends to emerge and, before you know it, the majority of the designers showing seem to be having the same idea. One year it’s waifs, another year it’s tarts, another year it’s grunge. But fashion is, obviously, fashion: can serious designers and architects possibly be prone to the same flightiness?

You bet they can. In architecture and design as in frocks, the herd instinct operates. There just aren’t that many ways of hanging a dress on someone, of cladding a building, of styling a teapot, of designing a CD sleeve. Once everything has been attempted, recycling ideas is the only option left. And the waves of recycled ideas are no more resistant to fashion than the previous waves of "original" ideas. Everyone latches onto the same bit of nostalgia at the same time.