Polite Modern, by contrast, with its telltale mix of pale stone, timber and glass, all in the best possible taste, is becoming ubiquitous. Go to the big new pub on Newcastle's Quayside, one of the Pitcher & Piano chain, and you're in Polite Modern land, in that case by young architects Panter Hudspith. It's nice, but it hardly gets the pulse racing. I swear that 80% of all new doctors' surgeries and most new schools are Polite Modern. Most urban loft apartments - the ones that are not being gratuitously minimalist - are. The better office blocks in business parks are. Endless cafes and restaurants are. The chairs you are most likely to encounter in these environments - when the client can afford them - are the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen's moulded-plywood "Butterfly" type - being Scandinavian Modern from the 1950s, they fit today's mindset perfectly. The government-sanctioned book New Architects, recently produced by the Architecture Foundation with the involvement of Mark Fisher, the arts minister, is filled with undemanding good-taste architecture of this kind.

At the huge new Brindleyplace office complex in Birmingham behind Simon Rattle's Symphony Hall, Polite Modern is, as you would expect these days, much in evidence. Allies and Morrison, Sidell Gibson, Stanton Williams all toe the line with their well-mannered, nicely detailed big blocks. Even Piers Gough's little oval glass cafe with its roof fins is much toned down from his original, highly coloured designs. Sir Norman Foster (of whom more anon) contributes his dullest building to date, the excruciatingly dismal National Sea Life Centre. All these, however, are all blown out of the water by one glorious oddity. And it's classical.

Three Brindleyplace, Birmingham, by Demetri Porphyrios. Photograph: Porphyrios Associates

Demetri Porphyrios's office block, in pole position on Brindleyplace's plaza, is a red-brick building rising from an interlaced round-arched stone portico to a stubby Italianate tower. The portico is a gem, since the overlapping of the round, quasi-romanesque arches with their Doric columns creates a series of pointed gothic apertures: so you have Roman, Greek and gothic mixed up together. This is not an original concept, but you don't tend to stumble across it much in new buildings, let alone speculative office blocks. And although there's something a bit weird about the proportions of Porphyrios's building from the front - it's a little too large for the space, like a man in a tight suit standing too close to you - seeing it none the less makes you chuckle with pleasure. This is one that got away from the Polite Police. Creative Classicists such as Porphyrios, or his happily named Winchester-based colleague Robert Adam, are doing far better than they ever did in the 1980s and today run large offices.