These buildings are chalk and cheese in all kinds of ways but their respective architects have some shared experience. For Millennium Point - part science museum, part university, part giant-screen Imax cinema - the designer is Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, apostle of elegant functionalism. For Selfridges, the architects are Future Systems, led by Jan Kaplicky, who in his time has worked for Grimshaw (also Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and many others). Kaplicky and Grimshaw have influenced each other considerably in the past. Strange, and revealing, to find them taking diametrically opposed positions in Birmingham, just as that city is finalizing its bid to be European city of culture in 2008.

What is "culture" in this context? Millennium Point - which as its name suggests is one of the Millennium Commission’s "landmark" projects - is obviously intended to be a huge educational visitor attraction. It sits in agoraphobic acres of open space, its foyers are dramatically colossal, it has banks of escalators and wall-climbing glass lifts. And, on the Friday I went to see it, it was practically deserted. OK, so the university students were on vacation, whereas the school holidays had not quite begun, so it was not exactly going to be a busy time. But still - I counted about a dozen people there, in total. It’s not exactly the runaway popular success that Grimshaw’s more famous Millennium scheme, the Eden Project in Cornwall, immediately became.