Unlike some of his underemployed contemporaries, Hodder has at times seemed almost too busy as the commissions rolled in. But he’s had his disappointments, too: for instance losing to Sir Michael Hopkins in two important competitions for the Manchester City Art Gallery and a new campus for Nottingham University. It is still very hard for him and his contemporaries to break into the charmed world of the big-name, financier-friendly ennobled architects. The class of ’91 finds its elders from the high-tech revolution of the 1960s and 1970s still in fine form and very much in control. But gradually, the order of things is changing.

In style terms, Hodder is moving away from late high-tech towards something more solid, more tectonic. One of his most radical new buildings - which would be far better known were it in London - is the National Wildflower Centre at Knowsley in Lancashire. Part exhibition building, part café, part administrative offices, it takes the form of a long inhabited wall, mostly one room thick, made of moulded exposed concrete and glass, with big timber shutters that rise on hydraulic rams to form sunshades. The building - which also pays clear tribute to Lasdun's notion of buildings-as-landscape - shows that here is an architect on top form who is quite prepared to sidestep conventional solutions.

For all his undoubted ambition, part of the secret of Hodder's continuing success is not trying to be over-fashionable. He never issued manifestos. He never gave his firm a modish name. Though he is much in London, his home is still in a Lancashire village few have ever heard of. In a way he is a very old-fashioned, serious architect, true to his profession, trying to make everyday places slightly nicer, slightly better. Ten years since he first came to prominence, he hasn't let us down yet.

An architectural exhibition on Hodder Associates' Clissold Leisure Centre runs at Manchester's Cube Gallery throughout May and June. Tel 0161 237 5525.