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Here is a piece that I wrote for last week's AJ .... ..... The promoters of the 2014 Wolfson prize, for new ideas about garden cities – and the winners Urbed – deserve praise.   But it has been criticism of the winning entry from the Government’s housing and planning minister, Brandon Lewis, that has attracted most attention.  The episode is symptomatic of just how hard it is promote large scale development in the UK that is underpinned by anything that looks like an idea or a proposition. At the scale of individual buildings, it can be harder to gain planning approval for something interesting than for something mediocre.  Keep below the radar, don’t frighten the horses and you will stand a chance.  Come up with a bold idea and you are likely to be in trouble.  Sadly, the same applies to solving the country’s housing crisis.  Most of the new housing built by the volume house builders is dire, but as it’s the same all over the country, it’s hard to fin...

Dunkerque - half an hour from Calais, and though a historic port, almost entirely rebuilt after (Allied) bombing in the Second World War - had more going for it than I expected. Just east of the docks (and just west of the sandy beaches from which over 300,000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force were evacuated in 1940) is Lacaton and Vassall's recently completed FRAC gallery.  The south part, a redundant dockyard building on a heroic scale, is a giant shed, made sound but at present left largely empty, enclosing a single interior volume; to the north, its new conjoined twin, to the same profile and dimensions, clad in corrugated polycarbonate, houses a regional contemporary art gallery.  In the foreground in the photo above, under construction, a new pedestrian bridge will connect to the shore on the other side of a canal. Lacaton and Vassall's building is excellent - spatially rich, with great views out to sea and along the coast from the upper levels, and clever in its...

All over inner East London are sites and areas that remain stubbornly resistant to improvement. Several stretches of Hackney Road looks as if they are recovering from some kind of disaster - sites have decayed steadily over the last thirty or forty years, resisting the tide of gentrification (or renewal, take your pick) that has gone on all around. Between the east end of Hackney Road and the Regents Canal is an extraordinary area called The Oval. This is the relic, or rather trace, of a housing development laid out in the nineteenth century as two crescents of terraced houses facing each other across a small oval-shaped green, yards from the Regents Canal which was built in the same period. Today all that remains is the plan form, apparent both in the shape of the central space, occupied by cars tidily parked within the oval kerb in the photo above, and the line of the frontages of the surrounding buildings on either side, now a motley collection of run down, low grade light industria...

London badly needs more housing, but it also needs more parks, particularly where large new areas of high density housing are proposed.  This is one of several pressing practical matters that appear to take second place to consideration of the beauty of the city's skyline - which is important too - when the question of tall buildings is discussed.  Here is a piece I wrote for the Architects' Journal on this subject, published in the 18 July 2014 issue. ...... London’s ‘tall building problem’ is more to do with planning and urban design than architecture; and for residential towers, but also for office towers, the problem is more to do with density, plot ratio and over-congestion of built form than it is to do with height per se.  We want our city to look beautiful, but we also need it to work in a civilised way, and for that we need public space as well as buildings – public space that is not being delivered in most of the tall building projects currently proposed. In Mar...

The latest proposals for the disused west end of Smithfield Market have been turned down by the Government after a planning inquiry - six years after an earlier scheme for the same site was also turned down. The buildings continue to decay - buddleia on site continues to flourish. The market hall at the centre does indeed look as if it could be a good space for a new market, as proposed by the project's opponents, but there is need in this area for office space, not market halls.  Of the thousands of people who will be arriving at the new Crossrail station at  Farringdon when it opens, some will be looking for scented candles, but I think rather more will be looking for jobs.  It's hard to get as worked up about the existing buildings as the main objectors Save did, but they must be feeling pleased with themselves.  The self-appointed provos of UK heritage protection, they operate in an system where with more and more of the built environment protected in various way...

Today's Guardian  questions the wisdom of Thomas Heatherwick's garden bridge project, which has now been submitted for planning permission. Though anyone who stands in the way of a project that has Joanna Lumley's support has to think carefully, not least because you may have the gurkhas to contend with, I share the view that the undoubtedly multi-talented Heatherwick is overreaching this time. The proposed location - South Bank to Temple - is not a bad one (the 1944 Abercrombie plan suggested a bridge here).  But does a new bridge need a new design? The Millennium Bridge opposite Tate Modern does the job well, now that the wobbling has been sorted out, and is as elegant a structure as any that emerged from the boom years of lottery projects - its deck structure is almost unbelievably slender from some angles.  The design approach evokes, more evidently than some other Foster projects of recent decades, the pre-peerage Norman Foster's interests in economy of means, and ...

Off to see the Olympic Park, on the weekend that the south part of the park opens to the public on completion of the work that transformed it from 'games mode' to 'legacy mode'. There is plenty to admire and a few things to carp about, but in general terms the two most striking aspects of what has been achieved are (1) the fact that it has happened at all, and (2) the fact that it has been carefully designed and properly funded, with no obvious signs of 'value engineering' (but neither is there pointless extravagance). With London under huge pressure to grow within its borders, it is very hard to find opportunities for new open space of any size, let alone such a large expanse as this - and it only happened here because of the enormous funding made available to clean up a century's worth of pollution, ill considered infrastructure and then neglect over much of this area - which in turn only happened because of the Olympics, but which has delivered a major pu...