Chris Smith and the Millennium Commission held a reception a fortnight before Christmas to celebrate a year of "outstanding achievement of the many diverse projects the Commission has supported" for the year 2000. The "lounge suit" do (note the dodgy 1950s dress code) was held in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. The Millennium Commission has contributed £50m to this hugely popular London attraction.
Pointedly perhaps, the presence of guests was not required at the Dome in Greenwich, for which the Millennium Commission has dug much deeper into the pockets of its lounge suits. Yet, in visitor numbers alone, the Tate, a modern art gallery, beat the dome, an incomprehensible theme park, hands down.
Not that there was anything particularly wrong with the design of the dome itself. Yes, it's an old-fashioned, Dan Dare-style homage by the Richard Rogers Partnership to those twin architectural icons of the 1951 Festival of Britain, Ralph Tubb's Dome of Discovery and Powell and Moya's Skylon. Yes, it's also a rather likable rogue, especially by night. Nancy Banks-Smith, the Guardian's TV critic, described it as looking like a stranded jellyfish.
The trouble with the dome - the huge sums of money wasted on the content aside - was the lack of a single good idea, the smell of burgers that wafted inside and out, the vicious and churlish behaviour of the politicians responsible for it, especially during the lead-up to its opening, the stink over its financing and management, and the frightful row over its future.
Disturbingly, the year's other major architectural project connected directly to those who like having power over us was the bloated and ugly Portcullis House, by Michael Hopkins and Partners. This visual assault stands slap-bang opposite Barry and Pugin's fairytale Palace of Westminster.
It's a shame that so much effort, money and aggressive energy was wasted on the dome, especially as the doomed-from-the-start Millennium Experience was to set the political and cultural tone for the officially designated millennium year. It cast a deep nimbus cloud over so many fascinating and truly worthwhile projects that were funded by the Millennium Commission, one of several discretionary bodies under Chris Smith's wing.
Back to the pre-Christmas Tate Modern bash. The invitation was a brave attempt to blow that cloud away. It listed in bold type the achievements of the Millennium Commission... "A million trees, eight new bridges, 100 new visitor attractions, 550 village halls and centres, 8,500 miles of paths and cycleways... almost 2,000 new open green spaces, a million books to 4,500 state schools... 600 churches with new bells." Add to these the equally impressive lists that could be typed up by the Heritage Lottery and Arts Council Lottery commissions and it's clear that the sin of the dome has been redeemed in all but the press and the popular imagination.
Without doubt there have been some very good millennium-related buildings. The conversion of the former Bankside power station into Tate Modern by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron is a magnificent achievement, if a little too cool for some tastes.
There's the hugely impressive Great Court at the British Museum designed by Foster and Partners, and the handsome, castle keep-like Walsall Art Gallery by Caruso St John (their first major building and a critical triumph). In Lancaster, there's the romantic Ruskin library by MacCormac Jamieson Prichard.
In West Sussex the Millennium Seed Bank, for the Royal Botanic Gardens' outpost at Wakehurst Place, is a fine building by Stanton Williams and a superb learning experience. The American Air Force museum at Duxford is Foster at his best again, aided and abetted by a dangerously beautiful collection of US warbirds flocked around a B-52 nuclear bomber. There's Foster, a third time, with the Great Glass House at the National Botanical Garden of Wales.
Others not to miss are the Peckham library by Alsop and Stormer, the London Eye by David Marks and Julia Barfield, the Wellcome Wing at London's Science Museum by MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, and the extraordinary Eden Project in Cornwall by Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners. These hi-tech bubbles that appear to blow from a disused clay quarry look intriguing; we'll have to wait until next year to see if all the fuss has been worth it. Let's hope so.
There are buildings that don't exist but ought to by now - if the millennium suits had wanted it. I miss Zaha Hadid's opera house on Cardiff bay, even though it never left the drawing board or computer screen. It would have looked great; the project was scuppered by the Millennium Commission. I would like to have seen Daniel Libeskind and Cecil Balmond's amazing Spiral gallery, all fractals and wired-up geometric energy, completed and open at the V&A. Fortunately, Libeskind's Imperial War Museum, Salford is well on its way on the opposite side of the Manchester Ship Canal from Michael Wilford's busy new Lowry Centre.
There are plenty of other buildings I wish didn't exist. Throughout the year, British architects of another breed have been busy littering the country with a staggering number of trashy shopping malls, call centres, distribution depots, business parks, shiny offices and executive housing. Yes, we have seen some fine new buildings of which we can all be proud this year, yet these are outweighed by the junk that we somehow insist on as our right.
Equally we have watched the infrastructure of these traffic-coned isles slip and slide away into disorder. If only we could have invested some of those millennium billions into our railways and our hospitals as well as our museums and parks. Imagine if we had new main-line stations and other transport buildings designed by the likes of those who have graced our museums and art galleries.
The year did see, however, the completion of the last of the great publicly funded and publicly run transport infrastructure projects we'll see for many years: the Jubilee line extension of the London Underground between Green Park and Stratford via North Greenwich. Under the inspired and tireless architectural direction of Roland Paoletti, one amazing station has followed another. The line has become a tourist attraction in its own right. It is a truly great achievement; the sheer scale of some of the lonelier stations, such as Canada Water, suggesting future development around them in what, in parts, are still very poor areas of London.
At the same time, the principal gateways to London from overseas - with the honourable exceptions of Waterloo and Paddington stations, both beneficiaries of the design skills of Nicholas Grimshaw - remain pretty embarrassing experiences. Think Heathrow, think Gatwick, think Stansted (a fine Foster building being quickly trashed), and think the stink of horrid food. The millennium would have been a good opportunity to invest in a clear-up of these latter-day Augean stables.
On a smaller scale, two of my own best architectural investments this year have been the new edition of Norbert Schoenauer's peerless 6,000 Years of Housing (WW Norton), and the first English translation of Hermann Kern's Through the Labyrinth (Prestel). This is less a rainy afternoon book than one that could see you through a flood: a good year, then, to publish this masterly study of labyrinths and their relation to religion and architecture.
