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You'll believe a house can walk if you can get to the Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire by the end of November. Between then and now, the delightful Walking House, a 3.5 metre diameter hexagon of black steel tube, 3.5 metres long, will be going through its paces. What it does, as its name suggests is to walk, if only very slowly, at just 0.1mph in fact. Have a look above on YouTube to see it in action.

Six electrically powered lunar module-like legs with bright yellow pads, or feet, enable the house to go walkabout. Designed by the Copenhagen artists' collective N55, Walking House is an essentially romantic idea lovingly realised using new, environmentally friendly technology. The inspiration for the design was the Romany travellers' traditional way of life, roaming the country, and across borders, by caravan, but brought up to date: Walking House has no need for horses and reins or diesel engines, gearboxes and wheels to make it go. While standing still, it generates power through solar cells and small windmills and when fully charged it gets up and walks.

The NASA-style prototype has been designed for four people, although the members of N55's Walking House team – Ion Sorvin, Oivind Alexander Slaatto and Sam Kronick – are keen to point out that its structure can be extended, while if stacked together, a group of Walking Houses could form temporary villages. The prototype features polycarbonate windows, built-in furniture, including sleeping platforms, a composting lavatory and a wood-burning stove.

The idea is not entirely new, as the British Pop architectural collective, Archigram, designed a Walking City, largely attributed to the late Ron Herron, in 1964 and there have been any number of walking pods and other inhabitable structures in sci-fi novels, comic strips and films over the past century. Realised in the form of drawings and animation, Herron's Walking City was a hugely enjoyable proposal, an entire city that could get up, walk to wherever in the world its citizens would like to go, and plug itself into the local landscape for energy and supplies. The city could take itself on holiday, and Herron's beautifully realised drawings showed this giant automaton taking itself on trips to various exotic locations.

The thinking behind Walking House is compelling: why can't we live more like Travellers have? Why do we need to stick to one place? There are many answers to these questions, of course, but questions of culture, work, how and where we educate our children aside, the all too real answer is property. Or land. In most of the world, humans have parcelled up and privatised land and its ownership is seen as an almost God-given right. And, this is why Travellers themselves have found the modern world an increasingly hostile place. Wherever they go, the customs and rules of land ownership say "you're not welcome here".

So, while Walking House is a special project, it might be hard for potential future owners to find anywhere to walk their house to, except a caravan site. And can you imagine Walking Houses cluttering up roads on Bank Holidays as they plod along at the speed of a singularly dozy tortoise in the wake of caravans towed by cars? They wouldn't be very popular.

The nomadic way of life, although much romanticised, has largely died out worldwide. This might be sad, yet Walking House shows that the idea is far from dead, and that the notion of ambling through the world in the equivalent of a gaily painted Gypsy caravan might just be brought happily bang up to date.

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Shoppers at Westfield and nearby Shepherd's Bush market give their verdicts on the newly-opened shopping centre

Greetings, Shangri-La seekers. I know what you're thinking. Wouldn't it be amazing if there was a wondrous citadel designed by celebrities, a sort of giant vanity project, built by modern-day slaves, unconstrained by the fetters of democracy and propped up by hot, black oil money?

Faustus, party of one? Your table is ready.

Come fly with me to Dubai - not literally, of course, one couldn't be seen dead anywhere so common - a destination we shall classify as the Helldorado of the Middle East. And that's a tough field.

In recent months, it seems there has been something of a shift in construction policy in the emirate. Not content with building hotels in the shape of God, or Mammon, or Cher, the powers that be have decided that what the place really needs is buildings actually designed by celebrities, and to this end they have commissioned all manner of stars to do just that. One such entertainer is Brad Pitt, who has long been boring interviewers with his thoughts on architecture. Brad is like a hotter version of George Costanza, who, you may recall, spent most of Seinfeld wishing he was an architect. George once claimed to have designed "the new addition to the Guggenheim". Anyway, the hilarious news is that Brad is actually being allowed to design a building - an 800-room, five-star hotel complex, in fact.

Who else? Well, undead Chanel auteur Karl Lagerfeld is creating some sort of Coco-inspired Brookside Close on Fashion Island, part of that man-made archipelago The World. Boris Becker and Giorgio Armani are to unveil their own masterplans shortly.

But this week's compromised messiah is Mr Jamie Oliver, currently appearing in those "higher welfare chicken" ads for Sainsbury's. Jamie will expand his burgeoning moral relativism portfolio to Dubai, where he is not simply to build two restaurants, but will personally design each kitchen in the houses on some insanely expensive golf course development.

"I've never before been told there is no budget and just to be creative," says Jamie, a chap who will not go hungry in any sense of the expression. "This place has so much to offer. I'm really excited to be working in Dubai."

The kitchens etc are scheduled for completion in 2011 and yet, and yet ... Who knows whether Jamie is aware of the uniformly ghastly conditions in which the armies of labourers who work on this perpetual building site are forced to live? But since he proudly confesses to never having read a book, perhaps his people could do the requisite basic internet search for him and decide whether the risk of "Slave Labour Builds Jamie's Kitchens" headlines is really worth the 30m pieces of silver, or whatever the going rate for building some island units is these days.

In fact, to save them the bother, Lost in Showbiz would like to direct them, and any other celebrity thinking of phoning in some Dubai real-estate project for a huge payday, to read Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's excellent piece on the repulsive labour ghettoes that house the migrant workers. They can find it on the Guardian website. While they're at it they may care to look at the many reports from Human Rights Watch on working conditions in the UAE, which utterly condemns the practice of bonded slavery that effectively ensures some footballer's holiday house gets built.

But if Jamie still insists on chiselling in this unedifying manner, Lost in Showbiz can think of the most darling programming idea to make the trips doubly worth it. How about Jamie's Labour Camp Dinners, a super campaigning documentary where the chef enters said desert ghettoes and tells them that eating fresh vegetables and seared tuna really isn't that hard. "I don't know," says one camera-shy worker in episode one. "I come home after a 16-hour day, and once I've queued behind the communal pans with my onion, tomatoes and lump of bread, and wondered what year, if ever, the foreman is going to give me back my passport, I'm a bit past thinking about tuna loins. But I must know - did you like the way I fitted your marble-surface-mounted high-pressure tap?"

Still, there is at least one less celebrity building on the horizon. Not so long ago it was announced that Pamela Anderson was going to build an eco-hotel in Abu Dhabi, which sounds a bit like building a yoga retreat in Basra. But that project now appears to be in turnaround. Why? Well, reading between the lines, it appears - how to put this? - that Pamela didn't fully understand the nature of the offer placed on the table by one of those nice chaps in the royal family, which seems to have been more of a quid pro quo thing, as opposed to a standard Playboy centrefold civil-engineering commission.

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