Which brings us to the new Selfridges. When Grimshaw does organic blob-shaped buildings, there is a structural logic, a reason, for the shape - like the intersecting geodesic domes of Eden. When Future Systems do blobs - and they were designing blob-buildings long before anyone else in Britain jumped on the bandwagon - they seem to do it mainly because they like the shape. Nobody ever accused Future Systems of being sternly functionalist. They believe, as do architects ranging from Frank Gehry to Will Alsop, in romance and evocation. How can form follow function, when the function is just selling stuff? Who says that sales space should be one shape rather than another? The Birmingham Selfridges is an anchor store to the otherwise very ordinary rebuilt Bull Ring shopping mall, and could easily have been a rectangular box. But Vittorio Radice, former director of Selfridges and an enthusiast for radical architecture, wanted more than just a department store box. He wanted a landmark, a building that would come to define the city.

Therefore the aims of the Millennium Commission and the aims of a private-sector retailing group became one and the same. Neither wanted just floorspace. Both wanted landmark buildings, and in both cases for the same reason: everybody knows that crowds flock to exciting new architecture. So it’s a curious thing that Millennium Point - which has been up and running for some time now - should be so empty while crowds jostling through the building site of the Bull Ring are stopping to stare at, and take pictures of, the emerging new Selfridges. It reminded me of the days when the Eden project was being built and its boss, Tim Smit, decided to open it up for the public to come and see what was going on. They came in their thousands. What on earth was it? Smit was happy to tell them, and sell them tea and cakes.

But the reason for the excitement surrounding the Birmingham Selfridges, and the conspicuous lack of excitement surrounding Millennium Point, is to do with rather more than the fact that the former is a funny shape and the latter is not. For all that Millennium Point is really just a great long shed (and for all that Grimshaw was not so directly involved in the building of it as he was at Eden), it has real scale and drama to it. It is one hell of a shed. Spatially, it works. There are some glitches - for some reason you have to take a slightly tortuous route upstairs to get to the entrance to the science museum, when logic suggests you should just turn left into it the moment you enter the building - but there are plenty of circulation glitches like that at, say, Tate Modern.