Then Wilford swiftly renamed the practice, removing Stirling's name. Some saw this as indecently hasty but for both legal and personal reasons, Wilford was wise to do so. Although he talks of some lonely moments in the early years when he would sit at his drawing-board and imagine what Jim would do, this was never going to be the architectural equivalent of Randall and Hopkirk (deceased). "I would not automatically think, Jim would do it this way, so I've got to do it this way," he says. "I had to develop the confidence to develop my own decisions, and not be swayed by the thought of Jim."

Occasionally Wilford gets criticised for not thinking of Jim enough, though not from Stirling's family, with whom he remains close. He came in for some flak, for instance, when he was commissioned to remodel their Tate Gallery in Liverpool, opening it up a great deal more than, some said, Jim would have liked. It is true that Stirling was a shyer, more introverted type than Wilford - this sometimes came over as rudeness - and that to some extent this was reflected in his architecture. The two men anyway had different tastes. Wilford says he never shared the older Stirling's penchant for classical historicism, Thomas Hope chairs and the like. He was always more modernistically inclined. He regards the Liverpool episode with some amusement. Although he does not say so, it was clearly necessary to him not to treat the existing building over-respectfully. He had to make his solo mark on what had been a joint project. And he did it well: the Tate Liverpool is both bigger and better. But when it comes to completing an outstanding Jim project - such as Poultry or the Stuttgart Music School - he is assiduous. When Wilford won the Stirling Prize for Stuttgart in 1997 - grand ironies were at play there - he brandished the award and declared, "This is for Jim." Similarly with Poultry. Completing it as Jim saw it was, he says, "a mission, a duty. But we wouldn't design it in the same way now".

Of course there is no way any architect can shake off a 33-year design influence, nor does Wilford wish to. After all, he shared so much of Stirling's professional history. But he sees parallels with the way Kevin Roche and John Dinkaloo established a clear American identity for themselves after the early death of their master, Eero Saarinen, in 1961. Again, Roche and Dinkeloo had different tastes, and did not go on producing replica Saarinen buildings. So now, as we said, Wilford is his own man. He wins lots of competitions. Although one can see a great deal of Stirling influence in, say, the new Mannheim music and dance school with its characteristic rotunda and layering of forms, you'd be hard put to find it in 'Building K' for the Sto company in Germany's Black Forest - the forward-tilting one with the ocean-liner stern. And the Lowry, although it evolved from a Stirling/Wilford feasibility study for a much smaller Salford Opera House back in 1992, is most definitely Wilford's.

There is a touch of Jim in the clustering of pure geometric forms - Wilford is unapologetic about that, says that geometry is as good a place to start as any - and in the formal, almost Beaux-Arts, plan. Indeed, Wilford originally wanted the approach to the Lowry to be bang on axis. That has been scuppered by the commercial developers of the site next door, so you now approach it from one side - the service side, with its loading bays. Such is the power of money. Not that it matters much, since the overall composition is so strong. All the shapes, however, are abstract. There are none of Jim's historicist touches, no Egyptian cornices, no rendered masonry, no architectural in-jokes of the kind he loved and which some of his friends and fellow-travellers from the early years still find so perplexing. There is, however, a shared attitude: that monumentalism, the willing embrace of bigness, the rejection of the exquisite detail, the disdain for the purely functional. The idea of the civic importance of architecture as something beyond mere building. These things Wilford has in his bones. And he admires it in other architects. Will Alsop and Rick Mather come high on Wilford's list of favourites.