With much the same consultancy team that delivered the Eye, Marks and Barfield have it sorted on technical and cost grounds and have designed a number of versions of Skyhouse. Now they are looking for a client (a lot of meetings are happening with key individuals in the housing and development world), and they need a site. The site does not need to be very big - around two and a half acres, enough for a base that would include parking. Marks acknowledges that you cannot part people from their cars at home so easily as you can when they go to work, but still suggests only one parking space for every two or three flats, well below normal levels. But it does need to be plugged into a public transport network, and be somewhere where overshadowing is not a problem. One of the "gateways" to London, such as Archway with its existing low-grade 1960s office tower and drab parade of shops over a tube station, springs to mind. Or, of course, the East London River corridor where the government is already planning to cram as much housing as it can so as to spare the countryside elsewhere. Regional cities such as Manchester would have been no-go zones for such projects in the past because they were depopulating fast and other housing was so cheap, but that picture is now changing as people flock back into the centre.

There will certainly be other speculative housing towers, encouraged both by Skyhouse and by other new takes on high-rise city living such as the Malaysian-based, British trained Ken Yeang's plant-filled eco-tower at London's huge Elephant and Castle redevelopment. But most of the pressure for skyscrapers right now is commercial, not residential. Foster's City Zeppelin is for an insurance company. At Paddington, Richard Rogers proposes a hotel and observation deck above the offices in his rather slab-like skyscraper. Grimshaw, in contrast, starts his more slender, bony office tower very high in the air, allowing him to make much more interesting public spaces at ground level. He plans a spectacular new station concourse to sit alongside Brunel's - something that already has the conservationists all aflutter.

They're not perfect, but the design quality of most of these towers is streets ahead of what was on offer in the 1980s. We need a few good ones in the right places - not loads of substandard ones everywhere - and these city-gateway locations, handy for trains and airports, make sense. By world standards they are not particularly tall, which is fine - we should never be tempted to try for the world's tallest. Let America and the Far East slug it out for that title. What we could do, however, is lead the world by making a genuine attempt to reinvent high-rise living rather than high-rise office working. And there, Marks and Barfield's Skyhouse is a challenge to everyone.

Marks Barfield site: