What the Toyota HQ tells us is that a consensus now exists about the way big organisations work. Apart from the fact that the front is more public and the rear of the projecting wings are more private, there is nothing in particular that defines the space as being for any set purpose. Indeed, pains were taken to ensure that the entire building is one continuous internal space, with no separation between the office areas and the full-height "street". Desks could therefore spill out into this street if need be, though they are not planned there at present. The ceiling modules allow you to insert cellular offices and meeting rooms pretty much wherever you like, though these are kept to a minimum. It is designed for the usual mix of staff: those who are there permanently, those who get out and about a fair bit, and those who are forever on the move and need only occasional "touch-down" space. Ralph Erskine and Niels Torp may not have built much in the UK, but their influence on the social aspects on office buildings here has been immense. Toyota now represents the top-end industry standard.

The best office buildings question how we work. In the 1970s, Foster's Willis Faber building in Ipswich, and BDP's now almost forgotten Halifax building society HQ, both advanced office thinking significantly, though neither so fundamentally as Herman Herztberger's contemporary Centraal Beheer insurance offices in the Netherlands. In the 1980s, American fast-track construction techniques, the return of the atrium, and Frank Duffy's deconstruction of working practices revolutionised large corporate buildings, while Erskine introduced the idea of the office building as convivial micro-city.

The 1990s brought the new wave of social office buildings as technology and changing working patterns released people from their desks. Sheppard Robson's Toyota HQ represents the clear-headed acceptance of that thinking and its vigorous application. But it does not ask any new questions: not a single question that has not already been posed and answered somewhere else. For the next wave in office design, we must look elsewhere.