We conventionally regard architecture as an art - even the Mother of the Arts - and most ambitious architects accordingly like to think of themselves as artists. This is why their dream commission - the one most likely to get them onto the fast-track to fame and fortune - is what in America (and increasingly elsewhere) is called an art museum. A Tate, a Guggenheim, even a Walsall. The reflected glory is intense. You get a hit out of designing for art, you have lunches with agreeable and clever people, you know that everyone will write about you and film you. It's just not the same designing an edge-of-town supermarket. Science buildings, though - hmmm. Not in the same league as art buildings, fame-wise. But they have their moments.

There is a whole generation of architects which has aligned itself with science and industry. Nothing new there - Professor Lisa Jardine, for instance, in fascinating research undertaken for the Royal Society, has established just how much the architecture of Christopher Wren (a mathematician, astronomer and Royal Society member) drew on the expertise of other scientists of his time. Most notably, his friend and colleague Robert Hooke. Wren's buildings, she convincingly suggests, are conceived as vessels for experimentation and observation, yea, even St. Paul's Cathedral.

You know today's inheritors of this tradition. They are the glass-and-steel brigade, brought up on Meccano rather than Lego. These architects are the ones routinely described as "high-tech". They differ from each other in every respect except one: they do not like to be described as "high-tech". Still, nobody has yet thought of a better term. Nicholas Grimshaw likes it least - he regards it as a degraded description, too often applied to mere industrial chic - yet he perhaps deserves it most. As we see from his almost too successful Eden Project in Cornwall (most days there are traffic jams of people desperate to get in) Grimshaw and his colleagues are still hard at it, inventing and refining things, playing with their bolt-together kits. And at Leicester they have invented a new kind of building. It's one of those places people instinctively invent nicknames for. My editors, for instance, call it "the maggot".