This is why there are certain emotions you do not feel, upon encountering the Toyota HQ: among them surprise, awe, excitement. You can see that it is good, will work well, is intelligently thought through. In that respect it is like a Toyota. It is a little bit flasher than most Toyotas, though one must remember that the company produces some real street-cruisin' muscle cars as well as the mandatory range of family hatchbacks, MPVs and executive saloons. But I don't want to be too downbeat about this place. For a start, it is some way ahead of most office blocks as a working environment, even if it is not exactly breaking new ground. Secondly, there are some nice details. For instance, I liked the precast concrete ceilings very much indeed. True, they are a variation on the shallow heat-regulating concrete coffers most probably pioneered by Michael Hopkins and which you now find everywhere, but these are beautifully made and proportioned and have a witty little detail: the air extract, instead of being lost in the light fitting as usual, is separately expressed as a little sunken nacelle. It is based, according to Evans, on the headlamp detail of a '93 Celica.

There are other visual puns like this: the node points of the latticework roof apparently derive their appearance from a limited-edition hubcap of a few years back, while the heads of the office wings radiating back from the big curved main street are expressed in black metal as if they were cylinder heads, with the silver ducting of the air handling plant emerging on top of each like cyclopean exhaust manifolds. These little touches are not laboured, indeed you might well overlook them in a casual canter through the building. But as Evans relates, the one thing he always liked about working for Terry Farrell - a period of his life that otherwise does not filter through to this building at all - was his wit. If that was a post-modern thing, then there's just a touch of postmodernism in Toyota GB. If so, then Lloyds of London is equally tarred with that brush since Richard Rogers and John Young did the definitive exhaust-manifold stunt there, at the top of the atrium, way back in the 1980s.