It’s routine to knock Make architects these days. The practice has suffered critical maulings for two reasons in particular: its origins as a splinter group from Foster and Partners, and its penchant for ‘iconic’ shapes.

The new practice’s work could not stand comparison with Foster’s back catalogue, while the shapeism in question – as at Nottingham University’s much-derided Jubilee campus, roasted in RIBAJ (http://is.gd/hi84x) – seemed to be alarmingly random.  So what are we to make of the practice’s just-completed ‘Cube’ in Birmingham, its busily-patterned facade erupting into a shapeist glass crown? I went to Brum on a damp Friday to find out.

Brace yourselves: I like the Cube, for perhaps the wrong reason - the fact that it is an instant period piece. There you have the Noughties, all neatly wrapped up in one building like a Christmas present with a bow tied on top. There is the striving for visual effect as the prime generator of the building’s form, a concentrated example of the billboard facadism of ‘regeneration’. It is a mixed-use building but wholly, speculatively, commercial – retail, offices, apartments and a boutique hotel. Half of its office space has been taken by the Highways Agency. 

There is something about red-blooded commercial architecture that appeals. If you’re going to do a big spec building, then go for it. Slap it on. Be brash. At the Cube, you will look in vain for the exquisite detail. It’s clunky as hell. The glass is bog-standard bottle-green. The seeming miles of corridors and small rooms in the apartment section of the building are worthy of a Travelodge, despite the fact that it positions itself very upmarket, aspiring to top restaurants and hotel operator rather than the more mass-market offerings that you find in the vicinity. But I can forgive it all this, because it doesn’t care and because some of the architectural moves it makes. It’s cheerful with it. And this is in Birmingham, city of metal-bashers, home city of Make founder Ken Shuttleworth.

So hurrah for the Cube, I say, with its randomized box-section aluminium cladding panels, its fretwork facade concealing a roughly U-shaped plan in the upper levels, its glazed ‘horns’ ready to receive a rooftop restaurant, and its slightly scary fully-automated basement car-parking system which is where a lot of the capital cost must have been sunk.  Besides, I like the fact that its cubic form echoes the sharp right-angled turn that the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, right outside,  takes at this point of the city. 

Boxy metal outside, cheap glass inside, it’s about as subtle as local 70s rock bands Slade and Black Sabbath, but lovable with it.  In a city of mostly disappointing towers, I’m glad they built the Cube. Look, it’s not an art gallery, nor is it pretending to be. It’s value-engineered commercial development tat in excelsis, there’s nothing else like it, and you mark my words, in 30 years’ time there will be calls to have it listed.