There are moments in history that leave their mark in buildings. With hindsight, these structures define a period, its ambitions, values, skills and frailties. Like fossils in a geological layer, they are precisely recognisable they could not come from another time. So it is with the baroque churches of the counter-reformation, the colossal palaces of Americas gilded age and the spare modernism of the Attlee governments buildings for health, education and housing.

So it is also with the greying Teflon and white-painted steel, the straining cables, the walls of planar glazing and the gaudy graphics that tell you that a building project was started in the early years of the national lottery. This month, it will be 20 years since Noel Edmonds and Anthea Turner hosted the first draw, and the strange alchemy started by which eminent committees converted the spinning coloured balls into art galleries, sports stadiums, parks, discovery centres, bridges and places of more-or-less vague environmental purpose. This spree of public building was often wasteful and absurd. The way the lottery was set up encouraged constructions of unclear purpose and insufficient means of maintenance. It helped launch the ill-conceived idea that to regenerate a place you need only install a cultural icon and leave the rest to the private sector.

It was confused about its cultural and democratic values. It helped create a bizarre attitude to risk, which is still with us, whereby it is acceptable to blow a billion pounds on something as uncertain as the Millennium Dome, yet the lesser details have to be micromanaged by expensive consultants until the life is squeezed out of buildings or other cultural projects.

The lottery had disasters the short-lived pop music museum in Sheffield, something called The Public in West Bromwich, the dome. The Earth Centre near Doncaster received 41.6m, with the idea of reviving a former mining area with tales of ecological hope. It foundered and ex-pitmen retrained as guides and greeters found themselves out of a job again. But the lottery building boom also had triumphs the Eden Project, Tate Modern and plenty of well-conceived, well-executed projects that continue to enrich the life of the country. It stood for something that had been forgotten, which is the importance of investment in places for shared public experience.

It was only half-intended. John Majors government decided there should be a national lottery, the proceeds of which should be spent on good causes, but there was a concern that they should not be spent on things that would normally be paid for out of taxes, such as teachers or road repairs. So lottery money had to follow the principle of additionality, meaning that it would go to projects that wouldnt happen without it, and it had to be spent only on capital projects. Capital projects, give or take such things as buying instruments for brass bands, are usually buildings and so an era of accidental architectural patronage began.

There were other forces at play. The turn of the millennium was looming, along with a feeling that Something Should Be Done to celebrate an impressive if empty number. There was growing confidence in British art, design and architecture, which would be consecrated in the Blair years as Cool Britannia. There was burgeoning environmentalism. Interest was growing in the renewal of British cities and of the wastelands left by the disappearance of manufacturing. In 1997, the Bilbao Guggenheim would be launched, and with it the idea that iconic buildings could be at the centre of culturally led regeneration.

So optimism and futurism were back in fashion along with some sense, if vague, of social purpose. It was a striking contrast with the preceding decade, when Margaret Thatchers government all but killed off the idea of public building and Prince Charles insisted that whatever was built should look to the past. In the recessionary early 1990s, British architects had looked yearningly across the Channel at the grands projets with which President Mitterrand and other French politicians adorned their cities.

Suddenly it was happening here. Distributors were set up, public bodies handed the Brewsters Millions problem of spending torrents of cash. They included the Arts Council, the Sports Council, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and the Millennium Commission. Lord Rothschild, chair of the HLF, invited people of influence to lunch and asked for their ideas to help relieve his embarrassment of riches, a subject in which a Rothschild, of all people, might be expected to be expert.

There was no shortage of suggestions. It was proposed that all British cathedrals should be repaired and restored by the year 2000. Cities and towns raced to claim local specialisms that could be the basis of a museum or centre glass in Sunderland, pop music in Sheffield, space exploration in Leicester and (unsuccessfully) laughter in Morecambe. Ecological themes were spun into multimillion-pound proposals of varying degrees of lameness, some of which were built. Few stopped to notice that its not very green to put up a half-redundant structure.

Newspapers and journalists were bombarded with ideas. Among those I received was a new age-y proposal for celebrating the millennium. It came with a sketch of a large circular structure, with smaller circles attached to its circumference, to be built on the Greenwich peninsula in London. The group in question said this circle had been designed by the celebrated architect Richard Rogers, so I checked with his office. Oh no, came the slightly embarrassed reply, it was not really one of the practices projects. It was just a doodle done by one of Rogerss partners, as a favour to some friends of his.

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The buildings that won the national lottery jackpot the hits and misses