Home sweet home office?

On Sunday, I had coffee in Somerset House. It was very nice, thank you.

The week before, I had visited the Government building in Marsham Street; home of the Home Office.

It got me thinking.

These two buildings are almost identical, other than being built 200 years apart. Both are prestige buildings for civil servants, with money spent on projecting the spirit of the age.

Somerset House was built in 1776 and was the first major building intended exclusively as Government offices. Designed by William Chambers, best known for the Gold State Coach that is seen only at monarchs’ coronations, it is a building that expresses the confidence of an emerging imperial power in the grand Palladian style that was about to pass out of fashion.

2 Marsham Street, the Home Office building, was designed in 2005 by Terry Farrell, Britain’s leading postmodern architect. Commissioned in the age of “cool Britannia”, it is expensive (£331m; or a fiver from each of us) and expansive. Terry Farrell’s a good chap, as recent architects go. He built Charing Cross station, which I think is the best new riverside building in central London. He built TV-AM in Camden which I don’t love, but many do. He rescued Paternoster Square from 1960s hell. Oh, and he built the MI6 building that James Bond made famous.

If anyone could build today’s successor to Somerset House, it would be Terry Farrell.

So… why is it not as good? Is it simply the cynicism of our age? In 200 years’ time, will our descendants kick out the civil servants from 2 Marsham Street (as we did from Somerset House in 2009), unable to comprehend such a glorious building not being open to all? Will it become a focal point, as Somerset House has become? I don’t know, but somehow, I doubt it.

The Gherkin is fabulous. So is Canary Wharf tube station. And Southwark. And the British Library (from the inside). However, these buildings are huge, subterranean or only beautiful from within. We seem to have lost the knack of making truly beautiful buildings that enhance the streets they sit in.

Why?