This is the problem with Libeskind's London debut. It is not so "oh-my-god-what's-that" as it would have been ten, or even five, years ago. It is not nearly so original as his still-unbuilt "Spiral" extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum, or the "shattered globe" concept of his Imperial War Museum in Manchester. It lacks the visceral intellectual force of his Jewish Museum in Berlin, or the overt popular symbolism of his Ground Zero masterplan. There, his "Freedom Tower" proposal, which he was reluctantly forced to co-design with David Childs of the giant American architectural firm SOM, is just an abstract take on the Statue of Liberty. In contrast to all these products of the Libeskind brain, the Graduate School is in truth a relatively ordinary little £3.5 million building in what is getting to be, internationally, a very familiar style. How quickly architects lose the power to shock and awe.

Libeskind always has to have a point of reference, a slice of reality or myth or metaphor from which he generates his architectural ideas. Here, it is somewhat forced. The building, with its three main intersecting angled pieces, is supposedly set out from the shape of the constellation Orion. This is because Orion is, he says, "the spatial emblem of the Northern sky." At the time he won this competition in 2001, his client was called the University of North London. Now it has merged with another college and dropped the "North" from its name, Libeskind's decidedly shaky allusion (isn't Orion shared by everyone in the northern hemisphere?) has become meaningless. But let's not carp too much. This is not an internationally important building, but a locally significant one, and those kinds of buildings do not have to lead taste. They just have to be a cut above the norm. And on that count, Libeskind's Graduate School is a deftly-composed piece of architecture that lifts its surroundings. Production-line it may be, but let's not forget that some production lines turn out high-class products.