Happily not. Any firm of architects employing 60 people in various offices around the world - and that's after the shake-out - is not exactly belly-up. What happened was that a few large projects that seemed to be in the bag, fell through the bottom of the bag. Such as the now legendary, very large and somewhat amorphous "Fourth Grace" landmark scheme for Liverpool's waterfront, plus some big jobs in Holland. Other firms could maybe have ridden all that out: but Alsop, who lives a bit closer to the edge than some, faced a financial black hole.

There were other factors. He points out that work in his traditional stamping-grounds of France and Germany was shrinking as economic worries hit the leading nations of the Eurozone. But he stayed on the case, restructured, and survived. "We're being more careful about the way we run things, obviously," he says. "But when it comes to our approach to the work, it's business as usual. After all, that's where the value lies."

Take a look at the stuff he's got opening in London at the moment. The new £10m Ben Pimlott building for the Fine Art department at Goldsmiths College, alma mater of BritArt, is classic Alsop - a tall metal and glass box with a huge chunk taken out of one end, festooned with an entirely unnecessary but rather glorious giant tangle of twisted steel tagliatelle. (Structural engineers are Adams Kara Taylor, with whom he worked on his Stirling Prize-winning Peckham Library). Called the "scribble", this tangle defines a sculpture terrace that is also a high-level viewing platform from which you can see right across to the towers of Central London. For the first time ever, rambling, shabby old Goldsmiths down in New Cross has a focal point that is also a talking point, and which connects it visually to the centre of town. But you might expect such an incubator of new art forms to encourage such challenging contemporary architecture. Who else would?

Well, quite a few. Take a ride north up the East London Line from New Cross to Whitechapel - one seedy-but-interesting London fringe district to another - and there you find a very different and much larger college building taking shape: the new £39m school of medicine and dentistry for Queen Mary College, tucked behind the Royal London Hospital. This looks to be as big a step for medical teaching as the Peckham Library, hovering high in the South London air, was for the world of the borrowed book.

The new Queen Mary medical centre is a twin-peaked iceberg of a building, two slices of rectilinear architecture linked by a bridge across a broad new public boulevard. What you mostly see is the bigger of the two peaks, a long glass box decorated with the characteristically childlike doodles of Alsop's old chum and artistic collaborator Bruce McLean. Inside that box are a number of colourful pods in sundry organic forms, each with its own separate function - such as meeting rooms, offices, and a mini-museum to be known as "The Centre of the Cell". And underneath everything, but daylit from above, is a broad sweep of open-plan research laboratory spaces.

Alsop can do this kind of technically demanding stuff. Just as he can do an ultra low-budget children's nursery in a north-west London council estate, using agricultural barn construction techniques. Barns are a thing of his - he's building houses in the form of "urban barns" as part of his huge New Islington regeneration project for developers Urban Splash up in Manchester). He does office blocks, he works with listed buildings such as Victoria House in Bloombsbury, a vast Edwardian neoclassical pile that now boasts Alsop's trademark pods and gantries in its interior. Alsop may not be typecast, but not is he a mere dabbler. He likes to debunk mystique. Why exactly, he demands, do people pretend that office buildings are so difficult that all kinds of specialist consultants are required to make them work properly?

For all this welcome stuff, I'm one of those who was getting fed up with Will. Even allowing for the fact that provocation was his calling-card, he seemed to have become a bit of a self-parody, churning out dolly-mixture masterplans by the hectare, or delighting in creating crude indicative building designs in the form of a giant teddy bear or Marge Simpson's blue beehive hairdo (You'll see plenty of this kind of stuff at his upcoming "Supercities" exhibition in Manchester). But there was always another side to him. Give him a real building to do, the more humdrum the better - rather than asking him for a non-specific icon-kind-of-thing, which was the position he was starting to find himself in - and he will more often than not come up trumps. The care with which he thinks about what his buildings are for, and how people could use them in a livelier and more interesting way than usual, is evident. That's why the Peckham Library won him the Stirling Prize. It's classy architecture, it opens up new possibilities, and it works.

There is another kind of dividend with an Alsop building. He's been told, he says, that tourism in Toronto is up by 2.3 per cent this year, and that the city fathers have attributed this directly to the effect of his undeniably spectacular Sharp Centre for Art and Design, a pixellated black-and-white slab of an art school perched high up in the air - above a row of existing buildings - on angled, colourful steel stilts. "I don't know how they work out those figures," Alsop chuckles, "But I'm not going to argue with them".

Nor am I. The Sharp Centre stimulated vigorous debate across North America and drew attention to Toronto's ambitious new programme of forthcoming cultural buildings. People were starting to forget about Toronto: Alsop's building, and the media coverage it provoked, made them remember it again.

So write Alsop in, don't write him off. In architecture today, the puritan backlash is well under way. For sure we need more serious architecture and fewer meaningless weirdly shaped icons. But the point with Alsop is that he doesn't see why serious shouldn't also be fun. The building he most wants to do now is a hospital. Why is it that only children's hospitals are allowed to be anything other than deeply depressing places, he wonders? "After all," he says with his characteristic half-grunt, half-chuckle, "We're all children."