Next month (May), British Airways opens what is effectively an office village for 3,000 staff near Heathrow Airport, London, designed by the Norwegian architect Niels Torp. The complex is a Mark 2 version of Torp’s ten-year-old HQ for Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) outside Stockholm. Meanwhile in Russelheim, southern Germany, Chancellor Kohl has just opened the first phase of a mighty new administration township for the Opel car group, designed to be non-monumental and "a place of human inter-action". This – such is the cross-border trade in European architecture these days – is by the United Kingdom’s Building Design Partnership. In Rennes, France, the high-tech power base of the Banque Populaire de L’Ouest, by Odile Decq and Benoit Cornette has become a regional landmark.

Frankfurt is now dominated by Sir Norman Foster’s sleek new Commerzbank Tower: Groningen in the Netherlands is marked out by the craggy outcrop of the Gasunie headquarters by Ton Alberts and Max van Huut. The new Berlin is defined by the gargantuan Potsdamerplatz office development, by a pick ‘n’ mix selection of famous-name designers. Why is everyone still building these supposedly obsolete places?

The answer is that apparently opposing working methods are not a question of "either-or", but "both-and". Yes, lots of people work from home, or on the move, using the now standard bagful of computer and communications kit. Yes, a paper-reduced work environment is very slowly becoming a reality as more people talk directly computer to computer without necessarily pausing to print things out. But all this does not do away with the office building: it just means that the office building changes its character. Increasingly, it now looks more like a social centre than a place full of desks. It is also apparently "democratic" in that the workforce is positively encouraged to wander around and chat. Notably hard-headed companies like British Airways do not do this for the hell of it: this way of working yields productivity benefits at the same time as it reinforces the sense of corporate belonging.

What is happening is a repeat of what happened in the movie business. When home video players first became common, the futurologists were quick to forecast a cinema-free future: the late Brian Wenham, in his early 1980s book "The Third Age of Broadcasting", confidently sounded the death knell for the picture houses. And then the reverse happened: as home video ownership grew, there was a concurrent explosion of multiplex cinemas and giant-screen IMAX movie palaces. The culture of going out and enjoying an entertainment in public, far from being extinguished by the new technology, appeared in some mysterious way to be revived by it. In just such a fashion, white-knuckle theme parks and museums have boomed at a time when logic might suggest they would be killed off by sophisticated computer games consoles and on-line encyclopaedias.