BA used to want to be big and efficient and profitable. Now that everyone knows it is all three of those things, it wants to be caring as well - since the received wisdom right now is that a happy company is a successful company. In view of the rocky relations BA has had with its own staff in recent times - last year's industrial action rather eclipsed the PR impact of the tailfin art - the new "democratic" headquarters it has built itself in Harmondsworth has come not a moment too soon.

The funny thing is, BA has been planning this building for the past nine years. That might make it seem as if they were softies at heart all along, even back in the gung-ho Thatcherite days of their pugnacious erstwhile chairman Lord King of Wartnaby. More to the point is the fact that today's chief executive, the Blairite Bob Ayling, has been involved with it since its inception back in 1989, when he was the company's relatively humble "human resources director". So this is most definitely Bob's building. In tune with the new working practices it represents, he has a room but no desk.

This is an office complex designed on the principle that it is a village for 2,800 people, rather than being just another great big anonymous block. Prince Charles will open it on July 22, having allegedly sent his spies ahead to make sure it won't blow apart his own carefully-nurtured architectural image. No need to worry. This is a very modern building indeed, but the crucial thing is that it is Scandinavian modern rather than corporate power-broking modern. It wears the architectural equivalent of a baggy linen suit with open-necked shirt. It is, dare one say, positively Branson-like in its desire to please.

Its Norwegian architect, Niels Torp, is a champion of humanist office design - which means offices as social, clubbable places rather than as nine-to-five locations where you are chained to a desk and given two 15-minute coffee breaks a day. BA chose him because, back in the mid 1980s, he had designed an influential HQ outside Stockholm for the Scandinavian airline SAS - a building that can now be seen as a prototype for the much larger and more sophisticated new BA equivalent. Torp and his senior lieutenant Oyvind Neslein, unhampered by the conventional British idea of an office building as a rectangle of office floors around a glorified lightwell, instead designed "Waterside" as it is now called, as a series of big "houses" along a glazed street.