The great gherkin in the sky

What's it for? Who said it could go there? And who really benefits from parking this 600ft ego-trip in the middle of our capital city? Stephen Bayley asks, are our architects completely out of control?

urning left out of the road where I live, there is a distant prospect of the City. What was once John Donne's "frozen sea of calamity and tribulation" is now a mighty urban engine that powers the world economy, pulsing bursts of pixellated knowledge, digitised money and stern authority to all corners of our globe. What do I see dominating the skyline today? Not Wren's cold, austere and magnificent St Paul's, whose dome has defined the image and character of London for centuries, but something rather different. Ludic and odd, even erotic to some, Norman Foster's 40-storey headquarters for Swiss Re is quickly taking shape, the first of a new generation of VBBs (Very Big Buildings) that will change the character of London.

There are those imagists, of poetic bent, who say the ovoid cross-braced steel and aluminium, glass-clad 590ft structure reminds them of a young green pickling cucumber, or gherkin. I would propose as a possible alternative, the detumescing intromittent organ of a baboon. What these ludicrous associations might do for the corporate identity of a proud Zurich insurance company is not our business. The VBB and its influence on London is. Will more of them be good for us?

In New York they have a way of measuring property values: you simply count the number of attractive women on the street and the higher the number, the higher the rents. In London, it's different: you count the tower cranes on the ground. The City, in a forest of them, is one of the most vital and expensive building laboratories on the planet, where the future of corporate architecture is being rehearsed.

Swiss Re is on the ancient City thoroughfare of St Mary Axe, a street that has known more than its fair amount of calamity and tribulation. Burnt to the ground in 1893, it was redeveloped and became the site of the City's last great Victorian building, TH Smith & Wimble's Baltic Exchange, itself obliviated by a terrorist bomb in 1992. The site now presents an extraordinary scene. A Scania artic delivering window frames from Austria is contorting itself like a mechanical snake into a claustrophobic loading dock, paralysing the entire Leadenhall area. Harassed Swedish site engineers in DayGlo tabards scurry. Already there is a lot of neck-craning, a handful of amateur photographers and a television crew ogling this curiously irrational building, a strange and compelling contrast to its neighbours, the sternly black glass and rectangular Commercial Union (nowadays Aviva) tower and the metallic technoid fantasy of Lloyd's. And this is even before Swiss Re is ready for fit-out next summer. Meanwhile, a flatbed from Sheffield arrives with pallets of Firetech insulation as the rhomboid glazing advances up the organic cone panel by panel. Money on the move certainly makes good street theatre.

There are (some) subtleties to Swiss Re's apparently irrational design: the shape is said to be aerodynamically sound, obviating the gusty down-draughts generated by some tower blocks that can turn city streets into a howling winter Gobi of dust and litter. In addition, the windows are designed to open so that pleasing irregular surface effects will occur throughout the day. It is a striking building, but is it a good one? What does it tell us about big-ticket architecture in Britain today?

In a damning attack on Foster in Prospect (March 2002), Britain's most eloquent and unbiddable architectural critic, Rowan Moore, said Foster's buildings "clad the establishment in slick Modernist clothes, serving power not people". It is true that architecture has always served dictatorships well, whether political tyrannies or financial élites. How is it doing by the rest of us?

Metaphors, especially morphological ones, are interesting ways to assess the status of things. The gherkin smear and my own more scatological development of it clearly suggest a humorous disrespect for architects, which is revealing. Although – or perhaps because – one in 2,000 Britons is an architect, few professions are held in lower popular esteem.

"Trust me, I'm an architect" is something you do not hear every day. In modern life there is no other professional encounter so likely to end in tears as a meeting between an architect and his client. There is something in architectural culture that seems to guarantee conflict and disappointment. This is not new. The entry on "architects" in Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idées reçues says: "Tous imbéciles. Oublient toujours l'escalier des maisons". As the annual Stirling Prize approaches and Swiss Re morphs skywards, it is interesting to reflect on this troubling and troublesome profession.

Never mind the psycho-sexual aspects of imposing enormous erections on the public, the architect's natural tendency towards aggrandisement has been greatly enhanced by the technical advances that have allowed the creation of VBBs. While Marinetti, Sant'Elia and Frank Lloyd Wright could only dream, computer-aided design makes all things possible. But, continuing the psycho-sexual theme, this same empowering technology has emasculated the architect. The bitter truth is that construction companies, like Skanska, scurrying on Swiss Re, could build a perfectly acceptable 40-storey tower without the intervention of a single member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. So, architects are driven towards extremes of expressionism. They invent startling shapes and finishes. To describe these bravura effects, Tom Wolfe coined the term "kerbflash".

While the kerbflash of the skyscraper suits business clients in pursuit of visual equity, it may be less well-suited to the needs of real people. Artistically, architects – to adapt Peter Parker's remark – are coruscating on thin ice. There is, for all the superficial excitement of the dramatic VBB, a poverty of content. Ada Louise Huxtable is the outstanding architectural thinker of recent years. Nearly 20 years ago she anticipated the VBB phenomenon and wrote, "Today architects are looking at some very big buildings in some very small ways. The larger the structure, the less inclination there seems to be to come to grips with the complexities of its condition and the dilemma it creates."

Foster attracts attention because of the volume of his work. Of all living architects only he can be compared without irony to Wren. But he has departed from the ingenuity which characterised his early career. Brilliantly original building designs in Ipswich, Norwich and Hong Kong have been replaced by a showy and vapid banality, by kerbflash, by Swiss Re. What we are seeing in this degeneration is the destitution of Modernism – an absolutist design philosophy that sustained the 20th century, but is having difficulty in an age of complex variables. Shorn of all the moral force and intellectual rigour of, say, Walter Gropius, or the gloriously imaginative formal inventions of Le Corbusier, architecture becomes merely gesture, a vulgar grab for effect.

The VBBs do not, according to the architect Robert Adam, "have one ounce of architectural direction, one scintilla of intellectual speculation or one hint of wider meaning. Their Modernism ... subsists on a lumpen confidence that it owns the future". Adam would be more persuasive if there were buildings in his own portfolio to support his case, but he nevertheless expresses an essential truth. In 1896 the masterful American architect Louis Sullivan wrote an article entitled "The tall office building artistically considered". If one of our modern masters were to re-write this story, the adverb would have to be changed to "financially".

At the same time, the architects have, in full conformity with the requirements of the Zeitgeist, turned themselves into brands. Richard Rogers has signature motifs, as does Will Alsop. Foster's name on a developer's prospectus helps planners decide favourably.

Great buildings, like Frank Gehry's museum in Bilbao, which has culturally and economically enriched an entire Spanish province, change the world for the better. Against that test the VBBs fail: they will simply make the City more crowded. Yet Britain has excellent architects exploiting "The Bilbao Effect" outside central London. The recent Walsall Art Gallery by Caruso St John, Chris Wilkinson's Millennium Bridge in Gateshead and Will Alsop's Peckham Library are examples. Like Foster's own early work, all these designs have had a regenerating effect on their neighbourhoods.

Architecture should be about poetry and logic, but VBBs are monuments to marketplace pressures. "He who hesitates loses the commission," Huxtable wrote. Architects might also properly concern themselves with questions of excessive development: Renzo Piano's London Bridge Tower, if built, would dump another 7,000 sufferers on to an already saturated area to no one's benefit other than the developer's. Architecture should serve people above all.

In London's apocalyptic cityscape, VBBs are the most contemptuous demonstration of JK Galbraith's dark contrast of public squalor and private affluence. They are money buildings. And, as Bob Dylan sang, money doesn't talk, it swears. VBBs are not even architectural one-liners, just expletives. They have little attractive to say, and insist on saying it.