London's unwanted Foster child

There's a moment every famous architect dreads, or ought to. It happened when Basil Spence, maker of much-loved Coventry Cathedral, became Sir Basil Spence of Knightsbridge Barracks, wrecker of the Hyde Park skyline. Or when Hugh Casson, hero of the Festival of Britain, became Sir Hugh Casson, desecrator of Bath. It is the moment when brilliant, dashing, fearless, iconoclastic creators become Establishment figures, on the side of them not us, and when their well-earned honours become so much ironmongery, shackling their imaginations to the earth.

For Lord Foster of Thames Bank, OM, Knight Bachelor, Royal Gold Medallist, Royal Academician and laureate of the Pritzker Prize, that moment arrived on 30 May, with the opening of the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition.

There, in pride of place in the room devoted to architecture, hung a great glossy computerised image of Albion Riverside, a large block of flats on the Battersea waterfront, on the site of an old bus station.

The same project is also going on show this week in a reverential show on the work of Norman Foster's "studio" at the British Museum. So it is in two temples of culture at once, under the same roofs as the Elgin Marbles and Michelangelo's Tondo, but it is not the Tondo. It is a big, bruising monolith, a square-footage factory dedicated to the further enrichment of the developers Hutchison Whampoa. It makes artistic gestures, but these only make it more overbearing.

I think someone must have told Foster his buildings were boring, because they have taken to wearing I Am Not Boring T-shirts. On the river alone there is the GLA headquarters, now under construction, another levitating blob proposed for Sainsbury's just south of Blackfriars Bridge and Albion Riverside. On the rear, inland side, drawings of which can only be seen in the less glamorous setting of Wandsworth's planning office, the latter building is a blob on sticks reminiscent of the officially exciting architect Will Alsop. In the RA view, an irregular crescent of zigzagging balconies presents itself to the river, with curved cladding climbing over its roof and flanks.

The curves are probably also meant to be natural, organic, even motherly, and the all-over wonkiness might be to bring a little bit of Frank Gehry joie de vivre, a little bit of Bilbao magic, to Battersea. But it's stuck-on fun and joie de vivre isn't really a Foster thing. Even in the official view, Albion Riverside looks lugubrious, and it will look more so in real life, unaided by the added-sunshine button that computer visualisers love to use.

As for motherly, anything warm and cuddly about the building is under-mined by unfortunate comparisons with a helmeted skull, which would make it into the sort of mum that Norman Bates had. The curves are all convex and metallic, things you bounce off, while the crescent is filled with serrated balconies, an embrace of broken glass. No doubt it will help sales to be able to say, "As seen in the RA" in the estate agent's particulars, but we have to believe that Foster takes this project seriously.

We have to believe this because Foster lives and works next door, in an earlier work of the practice, from the cool, calm, dignified, but in some eyes boring phase of his career. Also because his title "of Thames Bank" indicates affection for the river, and because he loves to say that his architecture is all about "the city". Yet this is not a city building, and it doesn't help the river. It is an aggressive and defensive object, a three-dimensional logo, and one that will repel assimilation into its surroundings. Its public spaces are formulaic and it resists the flow and change that are the essence of city life.

There has always been a suspicion that Foster's buildings are embarrassed by the presence of human beings. Even with the best ones, it can be like watching a jet fighter soaring over at mach three - a display of power and precision, which leaves the grounded viewer feeling awed but small. This is true of Albion Riverside, except that it doesn't fly.

IF this project were by EPR or Broadway Malyan, or any of the other purveyors of spec lumps on the Thames, the RA's hanging committee would have thrown it out with all the amateur splotches entitled Smudge, the Artist's Cat or A Tamworth Idyll or Implosion IX. It hangs because it is by Foster. Which is why Establishment is a term of scorn: it is the thing that puts name and title and rank ahead of merit.