Hugh Aldersey-Williams, the independent curator of the show, has made his own comparisons, and has determinedly avoided asking architects if they agree. Norman Foster may hate that "gherkin" tag applied to his satisfyingly curvaceous pointy tower in the City of London, but at least he does not find it here. For some, it is more like a pine cone. For Aldersey-Williams, it is obviously a sea-sponge, and he has pictures to prove it. Which is not to say that Foster got out his soft pencil one day and decided to draw a skyscraper in the shape of a sea-sponge, or if he did he would never admit it: it just turned out that way for all kinds of prosaic reasons

However, plenty of architects do work from a natural-world image in their heads. The internationally-successful Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has carved out a career making everything from bridges to art museums and science centres in overtly natural forms. He has a building in Valancia like a giant human eye, another in Lyons like a bird with outstretched wings, another in Milwaukee which many - including Aldersey-Williams - also think of as a bird but which looks to me much more like the tail-fluke of a diving whale. Calatrava, in fact, is going just a bit too far - make that a lot too far - these days. Take one look at his new concert hall complex in Tenerife, Canary Islands, and you find a big white building that from some angles resembles the crest of a breaking wave, from others a giant shellfish levered apart to reveal its squishy insides, from others still the open beak of (again) a bird. It's enough to make you fall back with relief into the arms of our own Will Alsop, whose buildings are increasingly resembling marine organisms.

British architect Wilkinson Eyre - twice Stirling Prize winners who are best known for their "opening eyelid" bridge in Newcastle/Gateshead, have even gone so far as to design a multiplex cinema based on a spiral like a snail shell or fossil ammonite. It's not yet been built, but it's a rather neat way of getting a range of different-sized cinema rooms, from small to large, in one compact plan (as you spiral away from the centre, the chambers become progressively larger).

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