Gehry once told me, with no trace of vanity, that he has "a pretty quick take on context". For all that his buildings have the most instantly recognizable architectural signature in the world, all have more or less amorphous shapes, all tend to have glittering scales over their muscular underpinnings like the fish he has so long admired and studied - they are emphatically not all the same. The Dundee Maggie's Centre, for all its eye-catching oddity, is totally of its context. Set on the brow of a wooded hill, it looks away from the Ninewells Hospital behind it, out across the Tay. It is obvious enough that the stumpy little white-rendered look-out tower takes in the glorious view. Less obvious, until you go there and walk all round the building, is why the asymmetrically folded roof of shiny stainless steel plates is the way it is. Look past it, across the firth to the hills beyond, and you find your answer in the peaks and troughs of the distant landscape, and the sparkle of the sun on the water. Inside, the underside of that roof is a crazy latticework of warm timber and plywood, very different from the industrial feel of many of his other buildings.

Gehry has had trouble following up the triumph of Bilbao: how do you trump something that good, how do you avoid lapsing into a formulaic approach? But maybe the problem is with us critics, easily bored, always restlessly searching for novelty. Gehry just does what he wants. Now that he is no longer the world's most in-demand architect - that palm has passed to Libeskind - the pressure is off him. The new Disney Hall in LA gives no clue to his current direction, since it was designed so long ago. But his more recent crop of smaller projects has been interesting. And this £1.2m scheme works, you immediately realize, because it goes back to the type of building with which he originally made his name: the experimental house.

The whole point about Maggie's Centres, as demonstrated years back by the first one in Edinburgh, designed by Richard Murphy in an old stable block, is that they are non-institutional. They are not hospitals or hospices or clinics, they are independently-run places you go for a chat, a bit of advice, from knowledgeable people or other patients. There is always a kitchen with a big table where people can sit round and talk as they would at home (appropriate diet being often a key part of recovery). Always odd corners you can sit with a book from the library, or glean information from the internet. It's all to do with the notion of empowering the patient, allowing you to gain confidence, take control or just take stock in a way that is impossible in the production-line cancer treatment wards of the NHS. It's not an either/or: it's a both/and. The nearest they get to any form of treatment is relaxation therapy. So they are deliberately domestic-scale places. And Gehry knows all about houses - his designs in California from the 1970s on, including his own home, being what first brought him fame. So, logically enough, he has built a house on a hilltop in Dundee.