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Reflecting the true spirit of Christmas, the architecture family is engaged in a row.  Building Design magazine this week covers the controversy over whether the RIBA were right to award their Silver Medal for student work to Kibwe Tavares' animated vision of a dystopian Brixton of the future, said by those against the award to be all animation and no architecture. Prizes going to the 'wrong' people always seem to cause ill feeling that is out of kilter with the spirit of the awards, and for the journals at a time when there's not much interesting news - and the images in the film look a lot more interesting than the rather stolid type of architecture BD now favours -  it must be like, well, Christmas. As ever, there's not much new in all this.  Archigram, anyone?  But of course their work was mostly optimistic and Tavares' satire is pessimistic.  Back in the good old days we had Tomorrow's World, Concorde and men on the moon -  now we have English Heritag...

Buckminster Fuller used to ask architects 'how much does your building weigh?'  It's still a good question, but it's not one heard often down at the planning department, where the overriding obsession is always 'how tall is your building?'.  Other questions that you might think more interesting, about whether buildings are useful, durable, beautiful etc., languish way down the list of priorities. One consequence of this strange obsession is that new buildings are often expected to 'step down to respect the scale of the neighbouring buildings'.  Since in most cities that I can think of, not all buildings are the same height, it might be thought inevitable for some buildings to be taller than their neighbours.  But this apparently self evident proposition is not accepted as readily as you might think, and all over London you can see recent buildings where chunks have been lopped off somewhere between the original idea and the granting of planning consent. ...

To a debate on this subject at Design Council CABE yesterday.   Given a roomful of people - from the Design Council's traditional territory as well as its new built environment constituency - who all pretty much agreed with the proposition, there was a surprisingly lively and interesting discussion. One of the main speakers, ex RIBA President Ruth Reed, made the unanswerable point that in times like these, for a group like this to conclude that the answer was 'no' would send out a pretty dumb message to the government - and unsurprisingly, the answer at the end was 'yes' by a substantial majority. It was suggested by several people that a strategy was a necessary starting point but one that didn't get you anywhere without heavyweight political support and a sustained effort to deliver, but I suspect that a strategy is a nice-to-have rather than a necessary, let alone a sufficient, condition for design to flourish.  There appears to be little correlation between ...