The trouble with all the talk about Millennial architecture is that it tends to concentrate on the architecture. Understandable enough - what are you supposed to point your camera at, after all? But with our particular batch of turn-of-the-century buildings, the architecture is scarcely an issue. There is no style war in progress. Something rather subtler is going on. It's to do with space. Public space. The space between things. The rediscovered civic realm.
For years now, I've been banging on about how the public has turned on to modernism, but I think now that I may well have been wrong. Yes, the high-tech output of the likes of Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw is now admired, and even some older modern buildings, such as the National Theatre, are tolerated rather than hated. Architects were villains in the 1980s; often they are heroes now. But it's not so much a style thing as the fact that architects are increasingly giving the public what it wants in another sense. And that is not one style rather than another. It's to do with making nice places to hang out in. This is the age of the "flâneur", that evocative and untranslatable French word roughly meaning someone who saunters about, aimlessly but agreeably. Flaneurs need places to promenade. This is what architects like to provide. And unusually, some of them have been given the money to do it.
What is the main attribute of all the most successful Millennium projects? It always come down to free space. The triumph of Tate Modern is not its galleries, but the gargantuan milling-around area of its turbine hall, plus its other generous upper level break-out spaces. At the National Portrait Gallery, claustrophobia has been banished in the new Ondaatje Wing with its full-height lobby kept rigorously clear of art. But possibly the greatest triumph of the NPG's architects. Jeremy Dixon and Ed Jones, is to give the landlocked gallery a long view. Only from the NPG's new rooftop restaurant can you see right down Whitehall, from end to end, a deft theatrical device that lays out before you the political powerbase of so many of the British worthies you find in the collection. And of course space is the vital ingredient of the same architects' earlier transformation of the Royal Opera House. It may not have quite the acres of flaneur-friendly spaces available at Paris's over-the-top Opera Garnier, but for the British - who always used to see high culture in terms of duty rather than pleasure - it's a huge step forward.
Art galleries, like supermarkets and laundrettes, have always been pick-up joints, and this has been one of the great successes of Walsall's new art gallery with its wonderful sequence of promenade spaces allowing you to see and be seen: the gallery, which shrewdly mixes the arcane with the populist, now even runs specific singles nights for just this purpose. Maybe this was not quite what its high-minded, purist architects, Adam Caruso and Peter St. John, had in mind, but it was almost the first thing that occurred to the gallery's director, Peter Jenkinson, when he saw the finished building. This was a gallery not only for art.
