Anyhow, remember that this is an image building. As Evans remarks, Toyota is about to enter Formula One motor racing. Its profile is anyway somewhat racier than some of its Far Eastern rivals. If Hondas are boring and Mazdas and Nissans and Suzukis bland, then Toyota, with one or two cultish cars in its range and the Lexus upmarket brand clearly differentiated, fares rather better. OK, it's not Ferrari. Then again, it's not Rover either. Toyota GB is half Japanese, half British, wholly Surrey: it seems to be a symbiosis we are quite good at.

Anyhow, image: product launches and briefings will take place here, so you've got to have something to show other than a brick block. Evans makes sure the approach is as gobsmacking as he can manage, eschewing the direct route in favour of a meandering drive which first reveals the glittering building above you, then takes you up and along past the big tilting glass front, beneath which a waterfall cascades into a lake. You're dropped off at the entrance rotunda. Inside, you catch glimpses of cars hanging from the roof in a cavernous public space. Once through the doors, you're into a waiting area of video walls. There is the agreeable sound of the restaurant just down the stairs at the base of the rotunda: your destination, as a visitor rather than one of the 500 or so staff, might well be the radial conference rooms above. Glance around: the accessories are good. There's some Nigel Coates furniture, there's some Ron Arad, there's some Mark Newson. It's a theatre: people clatter up and down stairs or hiss up and down in glass lifts or gather on first-floor balcony break-out areas overlooking the big space. It's purposeful, impressive, corporate. But at no point do you encounter anything that you might think of as genuinely original.

The influences are clear, in terms of planning, structure, and aesthetics. You think of Niels Torp's Waterside Centre for BA at Harmondsworth with its big central social street and radiating wings. You think of Bennetts' Associates' Alexander Graham Bell house at Edinburgh Park - the plan of which - stubby wings running back from a frontal "street" is closely related and which also generates its effects by setting a rotunda against a box and placing both on a lake. You look at the toroidal lattice roof (engineered by Whitby and Bird) and think of Norman Foster's British Museum Great Court or, bearing in mind those suspended cars, American Air Museum at Duxford. (Foster also hung car bodyshells from the roof of his 1980 Renault distribution centre in Swindon). You look at the outwardly-leaning glass facade with its tapering internal steel supports, and you think of Nick Grimshaw's RAC Supercentre outside Bristol, or Lifschutz Davidson's Oxo Tower restaurant in London. This is, then, a place replete with references, some overt, some no doubt subconscious. In other words, it pulls together the key elements of leading building designs of the Nineties and reassembles them, with certain additional twists, in a mainstream corporate building of the Noughties.