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Changing the built environment to allow step-free access - an exercise which is costing a huge amount of money, and if you consider London's tube network, has really only just begun - is a good thing.  I have pushed buggies and I still push a wheelchair from time to time, and the world has got better over the last few decades for the millions of us who do this. But the move to Flatworld is not without a downside, and this doesn't seem to be discussed much. Making the world safe for wheelchairs and buggies has also made the pavements safe for tourists with luggage on wheels that is too heavy to lift; for badly controlled infants on scooters and badly behaved adults on roller blades (and bicycles); and, in a further contribution to the continuing atrophying of human muscle power, for the Segway. Anything that had George W Bush as a famous early adopter needs to be looked at with suspicion. Here at Port Soller in Mallorca, for example, a huge sum of public money has been spent in ...

The postwar Golden Lane Estate, on the northern edge of the City of London, is more lovable and more human than its later and bigger cousin at the Barbican (though both are good, with plenty to inspire those designing high density housing today). Golden Lane has also been been more extensively customised (before listing put a stop to all that at both estates), most notably in the case of the Shakespeare pub - originally a modern design admired by Ian Nairn, but now with an Olde England pubbe makeover, complete with retro joinery mouldings, repro carriage lamps and twiddly typography on the fascia (the big sans serif lettering on the white wall on the right looks original). It's hardly surprising, of course - the modernist pub, as opposed to bar, is an oddity that has never found much favour.  A rather fine postwar example in St John's Wood, the Rossetti, on the corner of Queens Grove and Ordnance Hill, with open plan split level bars, did flourish - it was knocked down and repl...

Estate regeneration - mainly, knocking down and starting again - is taking place, or planned, on a massive scale across many of the biggest postwar public housing estates all over London. Last week, developers Berkeley organised a morning of talks and tours at Kidbrooke in Greenwich, where the Ferrier Estate, built forty years ago by the GLC and now in the hands of Greenwich Council, is being demolished and turned into a mixed tenure development, at about twice the density of the old housing.  That ratio appears to be typical for such schemes, the 50% of housing for sale helping to pay for the 50% of affordable housing, reprovided in the same total amount as before. Work has been going on for four years now - the first phases, of an admirably high standard of design and finish, are occupied, and the last of the old buildings were being flattened in front of our eyes. The Ferrier, very isolated from surrounding areas, had become notorious for physical and social problems as early as...

Peter Frame's Rock Family Trees  are a delight for music geeks - and appear to be a nice little earner for their author and artist.  Someone should do the same for postwar UK architecture - though I suppose the market might be a bit more limited. An example of an architectural family get-together can be seen at Cannon Street.  The powerful exoskeleton of Foggo Associates' new building over Cannon Street Station (centre of picture) has a clear affinity with its neighbour, Arup Associates' 80 Cannon Street of 1972-6 (the Pevsner guide calls the latter a 'startling tower', though rather more startling towers have appeared in the vicinity since that was written...). Foggo Associates emerged in 1989 from Arup Associates, where Peter Foggo (who died in 1993) and his team had been responsible for many of the latter's most notable projects through the 1970s and 80s. The recent reminiscing prompted by Lady Thatcher's death has reminded us how much there was that was ...

To the RIBA / Observer debate on tall buildings, where we hear from Rowan Moore and Simon Jenkins (two journalists), who think tall buildings are a blight, and from Julia Barfield and Peter Rees (two professionals), who don't. For such a subject that is so emotive - at least in architectural and planning circles -  it was a surprisingly even-tempered and consensual occasion, with everyone, panel and audience, lay and professional, basically agreeing that the answer to the question 'are tall buildings blighting our skyline?' is that the ugly ones are and the beautiful ones aren't; and that it would be nice if there was a bit more planning to counter the opportunism of the promoters of projects. Moore thought that the London Plan sets out the right policies and quality standards, but that many project that have been built or approved fail to meet these policies and standards.  Rees made the slightly odd assertion that you shouldn't build high unless it is necessary to...

The Architecture of Funny Shapes was superseded some time ago by the New Boring.  But just when you thought that the straight line and the right angle had regained their rightful supremacy, it seems that vertical fins have gone all twisty... ...not just here in Farringdon Street, but on several big UK projects currently on the drawing board.   Did it start with the Olympic Stadium, which did something similar with its 'wrap' ribbons - or did they get the idea from somewhere else? If you want to give your building's elevations a little bit more life than would accurately represent the suits that will occupy it, this is probably a better and cheaper way than twisting the whole building. .

Nolli's great 1748 map of Rome - turbocharged version here - is a magnificent and continuing source of inspiration for architects and urbanists.  It is famous for going further than typical city maps of the period (such as Rocque's map of London, also from the 1740s) - and of today - to include plans of public buildings as well as streets and squares.  It thus shows the layout of nearly everything that can be termed the public realm, inside or outside - but not that which is private. Two and half centuries later, Google's Street View is catching up. Lazy or overstretched architects have got used to the idea that they can get away without visiting the site by using the street views that are available now of nearly everywhere.  But one can now visit the insides of some buildings as well - at Lincoln, for example, you can enter the close and go in through the great west door of that city's glorious cathedral to see the interiors of the nave, transepts and ambulatory (bu...