There's a phrase for this attitude among architects. They call it "technology transfer". The building trade is mostly still messy and Victorian, crude and time-consuming, its proponents argue. Since boat, car and plane makers have developed much more efficient ways of enclosing people-space than builders have, why not transfer the technology over? The idea is an old one. The despised Victorians were rather good at making kit-of-parts military field hospitals and churches, for instance. During the Second World War designers were convinced that warplane production lines could be converted into mass-producing pod-housing, once peace broke out - but somehow, it didn't happen. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the influential theoretical design group Archigram envisaged walking, plug-in cities, inflatable suit-homes and the like: they were the precursors of what came to be known as high-tech. It was this last period that produced Jan Kaplicky of Future Systems, now in his early sixties and finally getting real buildings built, thanks in no small part to the contribution of his much younger partner (in both life and work) Amanda Levete. Every new architectural or design generation rediscovers the pod idea: both Future Systems and the considerably less well-known Forward Architecture are syntheses of two such generations. In this way the theoretical becomes the actual.

The names of these architects tell you everything about their outlook. They have that impersonal yet optimistic, white-heat-of-technology feel. They imply progress through science, a science of anonymous white-coated boffins working as a team for the good of mankind. And in this great mission, appearance is all-important. It helps if your pod is made in some advanced way, but that is as nothing compared to the fact that it must look all spacy.

The media centre has landed

While Michael Grade's bowling alley podules remain on the hard drives of the computers that designed them, the £5m NatWest Media Centre at Lord's is gloriously real and complete. It was difficult to build, it took a long time, caused grey hairs and, admits Levete, tears of frustration. But their dream of a new kind of building, based on an aluminium monocoque hull made by boatbuilders, has been realised, just in time for the cricket world cup which started at Lord's in May. The only catch is that it is anything but factory-made. As with the products of the Bauhaus, the famous inter-war German design school, the machine aesthetic here is the result of painstaking human craftsmanship. It might look like a new version of Thunderbird 2, but it is more hand-made than many a conventional office block.

It is perched on two columns, with stairs and lifts in them, to give a good view of the ground down the wicket. Putting it up high also preserves a famous view of trees through a slot in the stands at what is called the Nursery End. Its curvilinear form and neutral, glistening surface help to reduce its apparent bulk - this is, after all, a big structure. Some have likened its wide-lipped facade to the Plasticene mouths of the Wallace and Gromit characters, and you can see why: but this was not the imagery that Future Systems had in mind. I find it looks more like a giant hand-held barcode reader, which is a bit more like it: it is meant to be read as a piece of equipment rather than as architecture.