Just as Frank Gehry's trademark style is used to pull the punters into smaller American colleges, so LMU is hanging out its Libeskind-designed sign here. Students are presumably meant to check out those boldly-sliced windows, those crazy shapes, and decide that LMU is a hot 'n' happening place to continue their studies. Such new universities have a high student drop-out rate, and grotty premises do not help. Unlike the previous wave of purpose-designed elite universities in the 1960s, the former polytechnics never benefited from any guiding architectural vision when their turn came. Hence this attempt to graft on the eye-catching architecture after the event. Placed on one of the busiest roads in London, seen by passing millions, glittering in pavement-mounted spotlights, this might as well be one long illuminated billboard.

Architectural fashions do the rounds. The shape of the Graduate School has a family resemblance to other Libeskind buildings, though its does not resemble any particular one much, beyond being jagged. What it looks most like is a miniaturized, monochrome version of Sir Terry Farrell's "The Deep" oceanarium in Hull, complete with angled prow. But this improbable scenario - Libeskind echoing Farrell - can be put down to the fact that the Farrell office, always game to try things out, was clearly much influenced at the time by the tectonic approach to architecture as practised by Libeskind and by Zaha Hadid. Farrell was demonstrating with The Deep that he could keep up with the avant-garde pack, and go jagged with the best of them. Plenty of other architects are also now producing variants of the style. When other people start building references to your work, then you know you've hit the mainstream. The downside of that is that the style becomes diluted, and people are never quite sure if it's yours or not. I've had several people ask me who did that Libeskind-influenced building on the Holloway Road. As if it couldn't possibly be the real thing. Not up here, in working-class North London, close to the borough of Islington's garbage tip and the site of Arsenal's new stadium.