Foster is hurt because he is the most in-control architect in the world. He has around 70 live projects on the go in 16 countries, but you get the strong impression that the bridge was the task he attached most personal importance to in the world. Indeed, he estimates that he and Ove Arup, far from making money out of the project, actually subsidised it to the tune of around a million pounds of staff costs. There are certain jobs, Foster explains, that he wants to do "for London". His "World Squares" project - taming the traffic and civilising the spaces from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall to Parliament Square and Westminster Abbey - is one such unprofitable labour of love. The Millennium Bridge is another, far higher profile scheme which does what Foster likes doing best: overcoming the technological odds to achieve an object of beauty: something in its way perfect. To be suddenly confronted with imperfection after all that trouble? Would you be a happy bunny?

But the incident will pass - he knows it will pass, he sighs, the sort of sigh which indicates that he knows he's not through it all yet - and it will no more affect the global stature of Lord Foster of Thames Bank than any of his previous niggling problems with various buildings. True, Foster's 500-strong, £28m turnover practice, based in London, Singapore and Berlin, certainly churns out a lot of fairly conventional architecture these days, and some of it is not good. Go and see the bizarre National Sea Life Centre in Birmingham if you want to know what the bottom end of the Foster product range is like. But when it comes to the top-level, important projects, he continues to push at the boundaries of what is possible.

Now he has just turned 65 as a multi-millionaire, he is as lean and hungry as he was when, as an cash-strapped working-class student in Manchester, he sold ice-cream and worked as a bouncer at nightclubs to pay his way through architecture school. This was very unusual: then as now, architecture was predominantly a middle-class profession. Having gone through all that, he once remarked, nothing was going to stop him.

Great Glasshouse, National Botanic Garden of Wales

In Britain alone at the moment, he has a higher profile than ever, and not just because of the bridge. He also has his newly opened "Great Glasshouse" in the Welsh Botanic Gardens. The end of the year sees the unveiling of his £98m British Museum Great Court project - a complex re-working of the long-lost heart of the museum around the Round Reading Room which will transform the place. His Zeppelin-like tower in the City of London for the "Swiss Re" Corporation is going through the usual planning hell. He has a concert hall complex for Gateshead under way, and office buildings in progress everywhere, not least at Canary Wharf. He has designed the new Wembley Stadium. Next week (June 27) a big retrospective exhibition of his work, Exploring the City