By this time, the focus of attention had shifted. The Clyde quays were being redeveloped. The Scottish exhibition centre on the north bank was soon to acquire its distinctive if crude "Armadillo" concert and conference hall by Norman Foster. Meanwhile, on the south bank, the site of the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival - a Heseltine-inspired regeneration initiative - had failed to regenerate and was lying largely abandoned. Horden's tower became part of the thinking for the GSC. Horden started off working in parallel with BDP but pulled out because, he says, he couldn't deal with the "lack of finesse" in the project. He saw the tower as a piece of beautifully-detailed aircraft design and thinks that - in parts - that aeronautical precision has been lost.
He has every right to be hyper-critical but actually, the tower is pretty good. Details of the cabin on top and the base where it disappears into the ground have changed a little from the original designs, but not in any extreme fashion. It is pretty faithful to the original and moreover, it's relatively cheap: of the £75m cost of the centre, the tower comes in at something under £10m.
I can vouch for the views: there will certainly be long queues when it opens. Its capacity is small, about that of just one of the capsules of the London Eye. The two glass rack-and-pinion lifts will operate a one-way system taking people up to the top and back down again. On the way up, you see across the city one way: at the top, you look out in the other direction. Those viewpoints will change, of course, depending on which way the tower faces at any given moment. In calm conditions it can be set up to revolve slowly and continuously.
The main exhibition will be in Allen's titanium-clad building alongside. And for all that we critics tend to get sniffy about buildings like this that do not issue from big-name "signature" architects such as Gehry, it is remarkably good. Like so many Millennium projects, it has to be a funny shape: the idea is interestingly-shaped buildings draw visitors in more readily than boring old rectilinear ones. They advertise themselves. Allen himself points out that he remembers the shipbuilding industry on the upper Clyde, and that this building - perched on a narrow isthmus of a quay between the river and a surviving, but empty, dock - has something of the character of those big ships.
Having arrived at the upturned-hull shape, Allen then slices it away on the northern, river side to reveal a full-height, sloping glass wall. The sunny south side is a diagonal tubular steel grid, clad in those titanium panels. It tells you most of what you need to know about the world industrial economy when you learn that the steelwork - which could well have been made by the local workforce - was actually made in Gdansk, which was much cheaper. However, at least the titanium panels were put together in Govan.
Inside the shell, the exhibition floors stack up in a freestanding concrete structure that does not touch the sides. At one end, a raised circular concrete platform marks where a spherical white planetarium is going to go in. The feel in here is good, exciting, just right for the schoolchildren at which it is aimed. Alongside, the IMAX cinema - we yawn, but it is Scotland's first - is better than many of its type. A satisfying shape, made from a steel space-frame and again titanium-clad, it sits in a pool of rippling water overlooking the dock.
There are some details that could have been better handled - the chamfered entrance corner is distressingly clumsy, betraying the jewel-like quality promised by the titanium. But overall, the Glasgow Science Centre is a convincing urban set piece. No, it's not a Guggenheim. But what with this and a high-profile architectural competition in progress for a new BBC Scotland complex next door, Govan has good reason to be proud.
Link to Glasgow Science Centre: www.gsc.org.uk
