Gabion: Welsh Phoenix: The Wales Millennium Centre 1/2

When the wind blows across Cardiff Bay - and it blows like fury - lugworms become detached from the tidal mudflats and splatter themselves against the walls of the surrounding buildings. Lugworms have no recorded views on architectural styles, but they do cling tenaciously to glass. After a bad storm, you have to scrape them off with a spatula, like old chewing-gum. It is important to know this: it explains why Cardiff is building itself a tidal barrage at huge expense, to turn the mud into a permanent, fresh-water lagoon.

On the edge of this lagoon - still a year off completion - will stand Richard Rogers' very glassy Welsh Assembly building, so anti-lugworm measures cannot come soon enough. Already in place nearby, built right out of the mud, is architect Patrick Davies's remarkable Ł19m St. David's Hotel for Rocco Forte. With its balconies and picture windows and great white-winged roof visible from as far away as Bristol, it too is bravely designed for a lugworm-free future. Mind you, the first year's guests, due to start arriving in mid-January, may well wake up to a free local natural history lesson along with their coffee and croissants.

Patrick Davies: St. David's Hotel

The big piece in the architectural jigsaw of Cardiff Bay is due to slot in just behind Rogers' Assembly building, and this bit already has a weight of history behind it. The Wales Millennium Centre is what has replaced the plans for Zaha Hadid's aborted Cardiff Opera House. It too is at least partly an opera house, though of course nobody calls it that. This is because all projects funded by the Millennium Commission have to show a convincing business plan, and somehow opera and sound business practice never seem to rub along very well. But it will be a lyric theatre, and Welsh National Opera will be in there along with a dance company and a handful of makeweight organisations such as an interactive arts museum, plus some shops and offices to produce income and, bizarrely, a youth hostel. One can only conclude that euphemistic titles are as necessary as creative accountancy to the continuing health of this particular art form.

But here's an unexpected thing. The Wales Millennium Centre looks as if will turn out to be a pretty good building. This is an extraordinary turnaround. In the immediate aftermath of Hadid's scheme being shafted by a deadly combination of local small-mindedness and machiavellian manoeuvrings by certain Millennium commissioners, the replacement first proposed by the Welsh architects Percy Thomas Partnership (PTP) seemed, and was, truly awful. "Meaningless doodlings" would be the kindest way to describe their scheme when first published a couple of years back. But since then, PTP has raised its game significantly.