We expect grand public building projects to go off the rails. They always cost far too much and take far too long. From Inigo Jones' Queen's House in the 17th century to Enric Miralles' Scottish Parliament in the 21st, that is how it is. Sniping at such follies is a national pastime. This is why you won't have heard much about the new Home Office. It is an enormous building that will cost £311 million to pay off over the next quarter century. Yet it has been built efficiently, without fuss or scandal, and Home Secretary Charles Clarke and his ministerial team have quietly moved in. What went wrong?
Those who regard the initials PFI - Private Finance Initiative - as being akin to the Number of the Beast will not be comforted to learn that this huge new palace of state, complete with 3,500 civil servants, is a PFI flagship. A private consortium led by a French contractor has built the Home Office and will run and maintain it for the next 26 years. The government has taken out a mortgage rather than paying upfront. The PFI system is hated by many architects and architecture buffs because it is risk-averse, therefore favours dull conventional buildings rather than exciting, award-winning funny-shaped ones. So let's see: just how boring is the new Home Office?
Well, it is rather sparkier than you might imagine - its architect, Sir Terry Farrell, is no slouch - but that is almost incidental. This is a rare example of a building that is notable not so much for what it is, as for what it isn't. Namely: it isn't the 1960s concrete toast rack of the old Department of the Environment. This - once correctly described by one of its inhabitants, Tory party grandee Chris Patten, as "a building which deeply depresses the spirit" - has been demolished to make way for the new place. Its going was like the successful removal of a tumour. Nobody, but nobody, lamented it. Its three tall slabs, set on a vast raised podium, wrecked the Westminster skyline, suffocated the 18th century streets of its hinterland, were deeply inefficient to use, and conveniently started to fall to pieces of their own accord. They had no redeeming features.
But the mind is fickle. We don't look across to Westminster today and laugh with joy that the DoE slabs are no longer lowering at us. We don't notice absence, only presence. But this bit of history explains why Farrell steered well clear of making a landmark building - such as, say, the Mayan temple of his MI6 HQ upriver at Vauxhall. In Westminster, everybody wanted the opposite of a landmark. So even before PFI was invented by the Tories in 1992, and long before it was warmly embraced by New Labour, Farrell was sketching out a speculative scheme to replace the Marsham Street towers. His 1991 masterplan for the site got the essentials established: a long recessed central block to Marsham Street, flanked by two curved-corner pavilions. It was a manifesto project, because it proved that by taking down the hated 20-storey slabs and replacing them with eight-storey blocks, you could actually fit in 50 per cent more people.
As it turned out, the Home Office reckoned it did not need loads more people, so the new building is lower still - seven storeys one end, six the other. It not only contains the same space as the vanished towers, but also the same as the more visible "Gherkin" tower by Lord Foster across town. So it is a planning diagram. At 656 feet from end to end, it is longer than the Gherkin is tall. Its architects recoil from the word "groundscraper" - that was a 1980s thing - but a groundscraper is what it is, no question.
If only someone had thought to install a time-lapse camera in the window of the Tevere Italian restaurant, facing the site from the corner of Great Peter Street and Marsham Street. The Tevere has been there since the 1930s, its oak panelling as unchanged as its food. Its clientele has long been a mix of clergy - this is part of the ecclesiastical district adjoining Westminster Abbey - and civil servants. The Arts Council is close by. From the 1930s, when much of what is now the Home Office site consisted of gasworks, to today is quite some urban journey. During the Second World War, reinforced bomb shelters were built in the foundations of the old gas-holders as part of an interlinked Whitehall subterranean system. The DoE slabs were later built on top of these. There were all sorts of rumours about later, deeper, Cold War bunkers down below.
If they ever existed, they may be there still. Because although the demolition men levelled off the site, the new Home Office is nonetheless built on the massive concrete foundations of the old DoE. Who knows? Still, the all-seeing Tevere restaurant provides a different sort of continuity. After a few years when its clientele diminished, it is now welcoming the civil servants back. 300 of them are arriving every Monday across the street, a process that will continue for months yet.
Not that they will necessarily have to leave the building. Unlike the previous Home Office - a brutal-but-interesting late work of Sir Basil Spence up near St. James's Park, with various overspill annexes - this one is designed to bring everyone together in a caring, open-necked-shirt kind of way. This is not your old Whitehall of pinstriped suits and smoke-filled rooms. It's as Whitehall would be reinvented by Richard Branson.
From the outside, it is stylistically uneasy: the central, sharp-edged block looks vaguely 1960s while the flanking pavilions with their soft corners have a touch of 1930s-Odeon about them. An attempt has been made to unify and sex up the composition with art: Liam Gillick, a Turner Prize nominee in 2002, does his colour and patterning thing with glass right round the building, most successfully in the oversailing roof canopy. He also provided the full-height perforated screen above the entrance, which looks uneasily like a portcullis. The central block is set well back behind raised lawns and reflective pools - obvious security devices, competently handled. Other artists, some better than others, are deployed around the building but these are commissioned works: they had no input in the design.
Inside? It's three buildings linked by multi-storey glazed bridges. Each building has an atrium, and these are connected across the back by a long, internal "street" - a veritable corridor of power running the full length of the building. Along this corridor, various brightly-coloured meeting pods and break-out areas are arranged. There is a restaurant and a gym down below, other little cafes at each end, a general sense of brightness and corporate endeavour such as you'll find in the better sort of business park. The open-plan offices are like modern open-plan offices anywhere.
It is all perfectly acceptable. As a home for a bureaucracy, it is a step forward. The PFI process has delivered. Farrell's urban thinking bears scrutiny. The artists' involvement is superficial rather than fundamental. But this is not, nor is meant to be, a memorable building. It slides from your consciousness very quickly. It cannot compare architecturally with the great buildings of Whitehall. In the end it all comes back to that curious fact of absence, of reversal. This is a place which is all about what it is not.
www.terryfarrell.co.uk - what's Sir Terry up to now?
