Making waves.

Nikolaus Pevsner once notoriously remarked that a cathedral is always architecture, but a bicycle shed is not. Shuhei Endo has proved the old savant wrong.

We have all seen industrial and agricultural buildings that suggest the great potential of shining galvanised corrugated steel formed into curves. And there can be few architects round the world who have not been awed by Glenn Murcutt's work in which the 'corrugated iron' of the Australian farmstead has been transmuted into a noble material.

Murcutt's precise and elegant handling of 'tin' stems from a fundamentally Classicising mentality, steeped more perhaps in Mies and Case Study houses than the outback vernacular. Shuhei Endo is equally fascinated by the material but has a quite different mind-set, much more Baroque. He works in Osaka and hence (like Tadao Ando) is not part of the mainstream Tokyo in-group.

Endo first came to international attention when he won the Andrea Palladio prize for young architects in 1993. Since then, he has shown his affection for corrugated metal in several buildings, none more dramatic or original than this chain of shelters at Sakai in the Fukui Prefecture. This is not the sort of place that normally gets into architectural magazines: a shabby old station, raggle-taggle of houses (albeit clean and comfortable), the sky striated with wires and television aerials; there is no Japanese elegance here, but the place is far more typical of this country than most images seen overseas.

Endo has made the town memorable. Seen from the train side, the shelters look like a bank of great silver waves breaking towards the tracks. The vaults dance back and forwards in plan to give a sensation of movement and they are cut with slots to increase the effect and illuminate the interior. You expect them to emit a steely sea-like crashing roar, and indeed in certain weather conditions they do creak and groan. This is partly because of their amazing shapes, which seem to have been created from conventional conic sections by the wind. But then you realise that this can't possibly be true, for some of the curves meet the ground at one side only. Their unattached edges are weighed into place by galvanised steel tubes strapped onto the corrugated metal. In one such condition, props (which on occasion must become vertical ties) add to stability. But elsewhere steel simply hovers.

Execution throughout is immaculate. All junctions are fixed with standard nuts and bolts. The heavy steel tubes which are used to stabilise the flying edges also weigh down the more conventional two-sided vaults and they are all strapped to the corrugated sheets with thin steel hoops which recall the bamboo straps that hold together the ceilings of traditional Japanese farm buildings. A similar traditional note is struck when the metal sheets enter the earth through water-permeable rectangular pebble-set slots in the slabs.

The result does not strive frenetically against its drab surroundings, as the Tokyo school often does. Endo uses material, technique and structural understanding to make a funny, memorable event of a place with great economy of means and wit.