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Our friend Joyce Jones, who has died aged 85, made a significant contribution to the life of Harlow, Essex, both in her professional capacity as an architect, and as an active member of the community.

She and her husband worked for the Harlow Development Corporation from the 1950s onwards. There Joyce worked as an architect/planner with Dame Sylvia Crowe, the consultant landscape architect who was responsible, together with the master planner Sir Frederick Gibberd, for the unique features of Harlow New Town's layout.

After retirement, she increased her voluntary work in the community. She was architect for the renovation and preservation scheme for Harlow's oldest building, Harlowbury chapel, dating from 1180, recording this work in the pamphlet We Saved An Ancient Monument. She also produced a beautifully illustrated history of the building and subsequently researched the history of the Harlowbury manor house, published as Landlords and Tenants.

In 1992 her book Seedtime and Harvest portrayed the work of the farmer William Barnard of Harlowbury. Other works published locally included Passmores – The Story of a House, The Secret History of Harlow's Roman Temple, and The House That Wasn't There, the story of High House, the family home since 1959.

Joyce was born in Pendlebury, Lancashire, and after obtaining her school certificate at Pendleton high school for girls, she enrolled for a five-year architecture course at Manchester University. This was interrupted by her time in the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a wireless operator during the second world war, monitoring and transcribing enemy messages for decoding at Bletchley Park.

After demobilisation, Joyce returned to Manchester and gained a first-class degree in architecture, receiving the Haywood silver medal for the best final-year student. She worked for Buckingham county council, where she met her future husband Eric, a member of the same team of architects, and also completed her MA. Joyce then moved on to Cambridgeshire county council, leaving in 1953 to marry Eric and settle in Harlow.

Her knowledge, skills, support, advice and friendship will be missed by many. Also missed will be her lunches which, although she was modest about her cooking skills (as, indeed, she was in general), included delicious soups.

Joyce is survived by Eric; her son, Lewis, and daughter, Sarah; and her granddaughters, Lucy and Sophie.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Obituaries, The Guardian

He was the anarchist of 1980s design, but the technical wizardry in his current London show feels over-polished and out of touch

Unless you die young, it's difficult to be a hero for ever. Heroes are commercialised. They succumb to what Norman Mailer called "exhaustion of the will". Or they simply go out of fashion. And that's what happened to Ron Arad – or at least, that's what we thought had happened. But the Israeli-born, London-based designer of bold, sculptural furniture has never been more ubiquitous. In the last year, a major retrospective of his work has bounced from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recently landing at London's Barbican.

Arad is one of the design world's few nameable stars. Most people will probably know his Tom Vac chair (1993), a rippled plastic armchair on steel legs that once abounded in cool restaurants. Or perhaps his bestselling Bookworm bookshelf, a flexible ribbon that holds your books in a spiral. But these are merely the outward signs of his commercial success. He also works as an artist, selling one-off pieces for sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as an architect and teacher. Over the last decade he has been hugely influential at the Royal College of Art, where he was head of the Design Products department until last year. Arad wasn't interested in teaching people how to be professional industrial designers: he wanted to teach them how to think for themselves, and a generation of designers graduated wanting to work just as he did – as a designer-maker, free from the technical constraints set by manufacturers.

To understand Arad the hero, visitors to the Barbican show should head straight up to the mezzanine galleries to soak up his early work from the 1980s. There they'll find a stereo and speakers encased in concrete, which look as though they've been hauled off a building site or hacked from a sea wall. Can you imagine a rougher envelope for all that delicate technology? So much for the precious, garish styling of the designer decade. Arad, recently graduated from the Architectural Association, had broken out of architecture to do his own thing. His work was raw and muscular, but also rich and clever.

It all started with an old leather car seat bolted to some scaffolding pipes. The Rover chair (1981), an emblem of Britain's fading car industry spliced with some DIY high-tech structure, was an instant punk icon, the furniture equivalent of the Sex Pistols' ransom-note typography. Before Arad had even noticed any connection to the prevailing counter-culture, Jean-Paul Gaultier was knocking on his door to buy six. He went on to hammer metal into clunky thrones such as the Tinker chair (1988), and turn looped steel sheets into a parody of your auntie's upholstered armchair in the Well-Tempered chair (1986). It was visceral stuff, and what's more, it looked like he was having fun.

Fast forward two decades to this show, and you see the Rover chair again – except this time it's made of flawless chrome. The sheer shininess of it epitomises everything that went wrong with design in the noughties. Galleries were falling over themselves to produce ultra-expensive limited editions for a growing collectors' market buoyed by the economic bubble. You want your chair in Carrara marble? You got it. The bling world of design-art was too often about expense for the sake of it. It was an upgrade of materials, but not of imagination.

None of that is Arad's fault. He had been blurring the distinction between design and art for decades, and we should thank him for it. It's not boundary-crossing that's the problem, it's the fact that the edginess of Arad's work has been replaced by a flabby, over-polished mannerism. It's too slick. Take a series of recent rocking chairs called the Voids (an apt name): no doubt they are technically impressive, but whether they're made of tiger-stripe acrylic or lacquered aluminium, there's no disguising that the designs are utterly vacuous. His architecture is even worse – this exhibition gives him so much credit for also being an architect that you wonder whether the curators have actually looked at these buildings. They're heinous: scaled-up, self-indulgent gewgaws.

Arad has been an early adopter of new materials and technologies – he used rapid prototyping (a method of 3D printing using plastic resin) to make a series of fruit bowls, and he incorporated text messaging into a chandelier for Swarovski – but often abandons them before he's achieved anything of substance. The show is a celebration of his magpie ingenuity, but you won't find much under the surface. Arad's work is all technique. It's pure expression through materials, form and movement. That means you can only judge it using taste. One of his giant rocking chairs (he loves rocking chairs) or overblown bookcases will bring someone a sudden jolt of pure joy, while the person next to them will yawn. He's the design equivalent of Marmite.

The superbness of it all is part of the problem. It's so bombastic that it doesn't leave you any room to be you – Arad is too busy blinding you with who he is. There is no sociological dimension to his work; it's not about people, it's about him.

The reason why this show feels out of touch is that we've moved on. Sure, Arad helped erode the boundaries of design, but which boundaries are we interested in? If design is going to rediscover its sense of purpose, it has to crossbreed with other disciplines, from biotechnology to healthcare. The most interesting contemporary designers are already crossing those thresholds; Arad, though, feels like he's been left far behind.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art, Art and design, Culture, Design, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, Reviews

Jonathan Woolf and Bharat Patel's radical reimagining of a north London semi-detached house calls into question all our notions about suburban living, writes Rowan Moore

Suburbia is the place people love to mock. It is the place whence writers and artists used to escape, so that they could make a career scouring its pettiness and restrictions. It is reviled by planners and architects. Suburbia, in which four-fifths of British people live (depending on how you define it), is accused of being stifling, ugly, boring, antisocial and environmentally destructive.

Planning policy, led by Lord Rogers's Urban Task Force of over a decade ago, has championed the opposite of suburbs: compact, dense, "vibrant" cities on the continental model. Now, though, there is a backlash or, rather, something more suburbanly genteel. A back-waft, perhaps, or a crooked little finger raised in a somewhat adversarial manner.

Paul Barker's recent book The Freedoms of Suburbia praised its "blessedly anarchic form". Trendy young architects now point out the virtues of the semi-detached and teach students at architecture schools to study the hidden social structures of suburbia. The mayor of London set up an Outer London Commission to support those commuter zones that largely got him elected. The country's smarter property developers are exploring what a contemporary suburban home could be.

The first purpose of the Painted House, in an outer area of north-west London, is to be a home for a family of 11 people spread over three generations, but it is also what its architect, Jonathan Woolf, calls a "model" for other developments. It shows what a large semi-d in a leafy avenue can be.

The Painted House occupies the exact footprint and volume of a pair of 1920s semi-detached houses that previously stood on its site, but is different in almost every detail from the suburban norm. Its owners had wanted a contemporary, flat-roofed house similar to others Woolf has designed, but local residents and planners insisted it follow the gabled, bay-windowed form of its neighbours.

This it now does, but without decorative trimmings. Its front is simplified and all brick, provoking a couple of double-takes. Is it an interwar semi or a sculptural image of one, a late derivation of Rachel Whiteread's concrete houses? And is it one house or is it two? One of the two front doors is half-concealed, allowing you to read it as a single dwelling, but the symmetrical pairing of its gables and bays makes it look like two houses.

The exterior is on the severe side and were it not for a certain quality in the brick and the details it might look like an austere postwar reconstruction of a doodlebug victim. The real surprise is when you go inside. Instead of a crabby, tricky assembly of parlours and halls, you find an expansive array of simple, generous, white-walled, light-filled rooms.

It all revolves around the kitchen which, in such a large family, is in use all day. Around here, different satellites orbit: a gym, a home office and the bedrooms and suites occupied by two brothers and their wives, parents and children. There is also a shrine to their Jain faith. Thanks to ample storage, all is exceptionally tidy, but not oppressively so, even in the children's rooms. "I think kids become tidy if you give them the right spaces," says one of the brothers.

There is, as yet, no art on the walls. "It's quite difficult to agree on art when there are 11 different opinions," he says.

The basic style is Shoreditch Loft Contemporary. It is superficially much as decent metropolitan architects have been turning out these last two decades, but it has a looseness, or a lack of uptightness, that sets it apart. On the top floor, the hipped, gabled roof of the exterior is allowed to shape a rich interior of triangles, slopes and facets that Woolf calls both "Elizabethan" and "well-mannered Frank Gehry".

Nor does the design fetishise materials, as other minimalist architecture does, as with rare pieces of oak, or pietra serena or Carrara marble imported at great expense. "People now can have whatever materials they want," says Woolf, "and they do. People use materials as a statement. But I wanted to achieve dignity and character without resorting to the emporium of world materials on our doorstep. I was just interested in form and paint."

This is why it is called the Painted House and Jonathan Woolf's approach contributes to the livability of the place and its absence of preciousness. As to whether it is one house or two, the question remains open. It is currently inhabited as a single, diffuse spread of differently proportioned and oriented rooms, but it has two staircases and a wall down its middle and it could easily be made back into two houses, if desired and required.

The question about suburbia is whether it is conformist and controlling or, as Barker claims, liberating. Is it a place of pointless etiquette and social codes, of competitive respectability and petty restriction, or does it allow people to do whatever they want, to be poets, or white witches, or the swingers of suburban myth?

The fact that the Painted House struggled with the planners suggests that conformity had the upper hand, but the virtues of the completed house are its openness to change and the freedom it offers to inhabit it in many different ways.

As to whether it is a model for others, its success is helped by its ample size – at about 750 square metres, it is four or five times as large as the average house. But its virtues of flexibility, adaptability and diversity within simplicity should be applicable anywhere.

• This article was amended on Tuesday, 9 March 2010 because we omitted to credit Bharat Patel as one of the people who "reimagined" the Painted House in conjunction with Jonathan Woolf.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Culture, Design, Features, Reviews, The Observer

Despite its wobbly beginnings, the capital's giant ferris wheel has become a much-loved symbol of London. And even urban sprawl seems beautiful from the top

Tony Blair officially opened the London Eye on 31 December 1999. But it was only after a number of technical glitches had been sorted out that the public was finally allowed aboard in March 2000 – 10 years ago this week. Since then, well over 30 million people have taken the vertiginous but breathtaking half-hour journey, in air-conditioned capsules, up and around what was, until two years ago, the world's biggest ferris wheel. That honour now belongs to the Singapore Flyer; with a height of 165 metres, it outranks the London Eye by a full 30 metres. But, while the Flyer looks like a gigantic version of a 19th-century original (the first of the breed, designed by George Washington Ferris, began revolving at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago), the London Eye is a fighter jet to Singapore's biplane. The Eye has since become as much a part of tourist London as Westminster Abbey, the Tower and Big Ben; a friendly curiosity, an urban eye-catcher, and an engineering wonder to compare with the Eiffel Tower.

When it was first announced, though, it was hard not to think that the London Eye was going to be some sort of Victorian throwback, an enormous music hall-era fun-fair ride among London's new wave of challenging millennium monuments– Tate Modern, the Millennium Bridge and the Millennium Dome itself. At the time of its opening, the joke went that the Eye was a perfect symbol of contemporary British political culture, going around and around uselessly and getting nowhere in the process.

When, however, the design by the architects Marks Barfield was unveiled, most doubts were cast aside. The husband-and-wife team had come up with a striking and rather beautiful hi-tech big wheel. It wasn't just the high-spec design that drew attention, it was the bravura manner in which the Eye's prefabricated components were brought up the Thames on river barges to Jubilee Gardens, and the week-long drama during which, inch by inch, the giant wheel was raised from the river and up into place alongside County Hall. Now, every view in and through Westminster, and along the Thames, was changed. Suddenly, this spidery and beautifully resolved ferris wheel crowned Victorian terraces, filled unexpected views along avenues of plane trees and sat like a tiara atop government offices.

Perhaps its best aspect is that it also offers awe-inspiring and uninterrupted views over London. From up top on a clear day, the entire city can be peered down upon and encompassed. The patterns of London's growth can be seen spreading into subtopia and the green belt like rings marking the age of venerable trees. Rides on the Eye in rain, snow or at night offer their own haunting attractions.

Of London's deafeningly trumpeted rival millennium projects, the Eye has been, perhaps, the most endearing. The Dome was undermined by the unforgivably crass and soulless Millennium Experience exhibition of 2000; it was many years before it redeemed itself as today's O2 music venue. The Millennium Bridge linking Tate Modern and St Paul's Cathedral wobbled, and it was some while before its virtues could be discerned. Tate Modern became almost too popular for its own good, a heaving cultural souk – acutely in need of its planned extension – where art can occasionally be seen between massed heads and shoulders. Other millennium projects, such as the refurbishment of the Royal Opera House, were fine things, yet tame in terms of fresh design.

The London Eye was always a brave and daring adventure, a throwback to 1951's Festival of Britain, held on the same site – an era when Britain could still claim to lead the world (just) in supersonic-era design and engineering. It looks to the past as well as the future.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Culture, Design, Engineering, guardian.co.uk, Technology

Tour the condemned housing block in north London, where more than 75 artists have transformed its empty rooms and flaking walls into colourful works of temporary art

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, Installation, Sculpture

Most of them focus on buildings rather than people, and will be of little use in Haiti or Chile

Steve Rose's article concerning Haiti and the demands of disaster-zone architecture is wide of the mark when he states that shelter after disaster and the plight of hundreds of millions of slum dwellers are "real, urgent problems for architects to solve" (Out of the wreckage, 15 February).

As I was told by a professor when studying some 20 years ago, the role of architects in these circumstances is "marginal at best". In fact, most architects are taught almost the exact opposite of what is needed. Architects are taught to focus on the product (a building), whereas humanitarian practitioners major on the process (involving people). For architects, ownership of the design rests with them and fellow professionals; for the aid world, engaging beneficiaries through sharing decisions is paramount.

Good post-disaster shelter interventions engage those affected in solving their own problems. When this doesn't happen, the results can be painful. As your article notes, Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation employed high-profile architects to produce "funky housing types" in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, but was criticised for "transplanting alien architecture into a context where it wasn't called for".

Too many aid-delivered shelter programmes have lacked genuine participation by affected people, and as a consequence have been poorly designed and wrongly located. Architects need to be taught this stuff if they are to be relevant in places where disasters like this happen.

Take Haiti, and now Chile. The need is immense and the issues extremely complex. As your article states: "Natural and man-made disasters have created similar circumstances around the world, where homes, schools, hospitals, and other structures are needed quickly and cheaply." Yet before the earthquake some 75% of Haiti's population was already poor. This disaster was anything but natural. Buildings fell down because of poor maintenance, lack of planning, and mismanagement. As Salvano Briceno of the UN's International Strategy for Disaster Reduction stated: "It's poverty that is at the core of these disasters."

Reconstruction in places where disasters are caused more by poverty than natural phenomena involves building back what can't be seen as much as what can. I agree with Robin Cross of Article 25, the UK's leading architectural aid charity, who says: "You need to pick up those [social and economic] threads and build a new Haiti around them."

Some architects may argue that to take this on board is too intractable and is beyond their remit. But this is the nature of the beast, and they cannot afford to ignore it. Architects must evolve to address the radically different circumstances for which they were trained.

Beyond the groundbreaking work of Architecture For Humanity and of Article 25 to which you refer, architects need to move beyond their traditional role of designers of buildings in places of relative certainty, to become facilitators of building processes that involve people in places of uncertainty and rapid change. Without this change, architects will remain on the margins of humanitarian response.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Chile, Comment, Haiti, Hurricane Katrina, International aid and development, Natural disasters and extreme weather, Society, The Guardian, World news

From the Pyramide du Louvre to Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art, we look back at the daring and elegant designs that made architect IM Pei a household name

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, China, Culture, Design, Editorial, guardian.co.uk, United States, World news

He is one of the world's greatest architects, whose stunning buildings have sparked both wonder and controversy. IM Pei, now in his 90s, talks to Jonathan Glancey

^"It is good to learn from the ­ancients," says IM Pei with a smile. "I'm a bit of an ancient ­myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape. Today, we rush ­everything, but architecture is slow, and the landscapes it sits in even slower. It needs the time our political systems won't allow."

Impeccably mannered and ­quietly spoken, Pei, now 92, has walked an ­architectural tightrope for half a ­century. Marrying ancient and modern, he has created buildings as influential as the trapezoid-shaped east wing of Washington's National Gallery of Art, as ambitious as the Bank of China's soaring HQ in Hong Kong, and as controversial as the Pyramide du ­Louvre in Paris. He has won pretty much every prize his profession has to offer; last month he was presented with the prestigious royal gold medal for ­architecture, a gift of the Queen, ­presented by the Royal Institute for British Architects. "A wonderful honour," he says, when we meet in London's Mandarin Oriental hotel, "for someone who hasn't really built here."

Born in Canton, south-east China, in 1917, Pei is the son of a banker and an artistic mother, who would take him to see dreamy Chinese gardens and ­mountainside shrines. "These have always been the most important ­inspiration to me as an architect," says Pei. "I have never forgotten those gardens: wonderful marriages of ­man-made and natural design. I've come back to them again and again; they are my guide as much as the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, who I admired as a young architect newly arrived in the US."

Despite being offered a place at ­Oxford, the lure of America proved too strong for the young Pei. "I liked the America of Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton – it was all a dream, of course, but a very alluring dream for a young man from Canton." It drew him to San Francisco, and from there to a string of east coast universities, where he studied under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. His intention had been to return to China, but war broke out and he stayed on to become a US ­citizen, setting up his own practice in 1960.

A rose-red vision in the Rockies

Pei's reputation was made with the opening, in 1967, of his bold laboratories for the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Clad in local stone that goes from pink to rose-red to ruddy brown with the passing sun, these geometric labs look and feel like an extension of the Rocky Mountains; yet they are defiantly man-made, right down to the slits and chutes cut into their walls. "When I first came to this awe-­inspiring landscape," says Pei, "it was as if I was standing with my mother again, on a sacred mountainside in China." This being Colorado, though, he looked for inspiration locally. "I ­visited the nearby Indian pueblos," he says, referring to the 13th-century Native American cliff dwellings, "and absorbed their forms and structure."

Pei was 50 when the labs opened; architecture, as he says, shouldn't be hurried. "As a young man, of course I had been looking for something new, even revolutionary. I knew what Le Corbusier was doing. I wanted to go his way. But, after some years, I began to think differently. I became interested in a modern architecture that made connections to place, history and ­nature. Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a ­revolutionary, process."

The infamous Louvre pyramid

Pei went from strength to strength with commissions for Washington's National Gallery of Art and the John F Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston. The former exhibits the powerful, elemental forms that characterise his mature work; the mere fact of being commissioned for the latter shows Pei's standing in his adopted country. His most charismatic work, though, was commissioned far from America. Twenty years ago, Pei unveiled two of his finest buildings: the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, and the underground lobbies of the Louvre in Paris capped with his famous (some might say infamous) pyramid.

The tower is one of the most exciting and elegant of all recent skyscrapers. Intended as a symbol of the new, ultra-capitalist People's Republic, the building was a special one for the architect. His father had worked for the Bank of China long before it was taken into state control, while Pei, educated by Christian missionaries at Shanghai's St John's Middle School, had long sided with Chinese ­nationalists rather than Mao's communists. Shortly before the opening of the tower, Pei wrote a powerful editorial for the New York Times condemning the ­Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, which he saw as a sign that the image China wanted to project to the world – partly through his cool, modern tower – was ­drastically out of step with the reality of life for the country's people.

Yet the tower, with its beautifully expressed, zig-zagging steel frame, rises out of the density of Hong Kong with a confidence and ­elegance that places it above the brutal nature of ­politics. It was the island's tallest building when it opened in 1990, and it still ranks among the finest ­additions to the city, a ­majestic peak in an urban mountain range.

The Louvre pyramid stirred even deeper emotions, and huge ­controversy. Commissioned as one of President ­Mitterrand's grands projets in 1985, this ingenious structure – at once ethereal and crystalline, ancient and ­modern – has slowly won over most of its ­detractors. The tip of an architectural iceberg, it forms the entrance to the cavernous Pei-designed lobbies below. "I hoped the controversy would die down quickly," says Pei. "Perhaps I was a little optimistic. But, you know, the choice of the pyramid was not some personal idiosyncrasy. Paris is a city of pyramids, from the time when ­Napoleon [after whom the court the pyramid rises from is named] became fascinated by Egyptian architecture, after his military campaign along the Nile." What's more, the Cour ­Napoleon is the urban equivalent of a desert plain. Pei's pyramid rises from it as purposefully and fittingly as its massive stone predecessors do from the sands of Giza.

Today, steering well away from ­controversy, Pei is working quietly on a Shinto temple in Kyoto, close to the extraordinary Miho Museum, which sits half-buried in the rugged, misty landscape of the Shiga mountains. "It will be a fusion of ancient feeling and contemporary design," he says. "You know, the first decent ­building I did with my own practice was a chapel in Taiwan." This was the Luce Memorial Chapel. Designed in 1954 and ­completed nine years later, it's a ­stunning, tent-like concrete structure with overlapping roofs that look like stylised leaves falling from the canopy of some sacred grove.

"I think I must be coming full ­circle," says Pei. Perhaps he is. From a Christian chapel in Taiwan to a Shinto temple in Japan, via some of the most impressive and – albeit unintentionally – ­controversial buildings of the past 50 years, Pei, the most ­unpolemical of men, has met the ­challenges of ­architecture at all levels. Somehow, though, I think he would still like to design a garden ­studded with modern ­pavilions that would ­complement (he is not ­interested in rivalling or ­bettering) the place that has so ­inspired him, the Taoist Lion Grove Garden in Suzhou, with its ­poetically named buildings: the ­Standing-in-the-Snow Hall, Faint ­Fragrance Dim Shadow Tower and True Delight ­Pavilion. He acknowledges this by simply saying: "In ­another life, I might be a gardener. How wonderful it must be to design such gardens."

Pei says his toughest ever ­commission was the Museum of ­Islamic Art in ­Qatar, which opened in 2008. How could he distil ­centuries of Islamic ­design into one building? He found the answer when he visited the serene, ninth-century mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun in Cairo. Its ancient elemental forms, and its ­precise use of shadows thrown by the baking sun, found a new life in Pei's hard-edged, geometrically bold ­museum, set on an artificial island 60 metres off the Doha waterfront.

Pei, after all, is a great believer in continuity. Married for nearly 70 years, he has four children, two of them ­architects. As we talk, he displays a huge ­admiration for the ­longevity of his ­fellow royal gold medal ­winner, Oscar Niemeyer, the ­Brazilian designer of ­cities the world over. ­"Oscar is still a radical," he says. "He's still at work, every day, at the age of 102. Wow! ­Perhaps I'm not so ­ancient after all."

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Culture, Features, Interviews, The Guardian

Chile is one of South America's richest, best-organised countries and many of its homes and offices were built to be earthquake resistant

Chile's earthquake was many times more powerful than the one that devastated Haiti earlier this year but caused only a small fraction of the casualties, thanks to geological luck and the country's preparation for such a disaster.

Saturday's 8.8-magnitude quake was a "megathrust" which unleashed about 50 gigatons of energy, but it was centered offshore and about 21 miles underground, dissipating its force by the time it reached towns and cities.

In contrast, the 7-magnitude quake that struck Port-au-Prince on January 12 was much shallower – about eight miles deep – and right on the edge of a city where 3 million people lived.

Eight Haitian towns and cities suffered "violent" to "extreme" shaking, whereas Chilean urban areas did not suffer more than "severe" shaking: still horrible, but a let-off.

The other reason Chile was counting its dead in the hundreds rather than hundreds of thousand was that this is one of South America's richest, best-organised countries. It has long experience of dealing with earthquakes.

Seismic activity is common along its Andean ridge. In 1960 it suffered one of the strongest quakes on record. Saturday's was the third with a magnitude greater than 8.7.

Homes and offices are built to sway with seismic waves rather than resist them. "When you look at the architecture in Chile, you see buildings that have damage, but not the complete pancaking that you've got in Haiti," said Cameron Sinclair, executive director of Architecture for Humanity.

Sinclair said Chilean architects have built thousands of low-income houses to be earthquake resistant. It is required by blueprints and building codes.

Chileans may still ask themselves if they did enough to prepare. In Concepcion, one of the hardest hit places, many houses made of adobe crumbled, as did a recent 15-storey apartment block. The university caught fire and gas and power lines snapped. Many streets were littered with rubble and, just as in Port-au-Prince, inmates escaped from a damaged prison.

In Santiago, the capital, large sections of the renovated airport's roof caved in. About 1.5 million Chileans were affected and 500,000 homes severely damaged. In some places rescuers complained of lack of fuel for equipment.

Even with damage estimated at $15bn-$30bn (£9.8-19.6bn), and airports, motorways and bridges shut, the state responded swiftly. "The fact that the president [Michelle Bachelet] was out giving minute-to-minute reports a few hours after the quake in the middle of the night gives you an indication of their disaster response," said Sinclair.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Chile, Natural disasters and extreme weather, News, The Guardian, World news

Croydon gave the world Kate Moss, but can it ever be sexy? An exciting team of young planners are set to revive the south London suburb and blaze a trail for all British towns, writes Rowan Moore

Recently the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games announced that they had completed their "food vision". I won't dwell on what this was, but it was final proof that the word "vision" has suffered drastic devaluation. Once it applied to the experiences of exalted saints and prophets, which inspired dazzling paintings and books of the Bible. Now it means something slightly stronger than "memo".

The suburban borough of Croydon has also been subject to repeated "visions" over the past two decades, namely Croydon: The Future; Vision 20:20 and Will Alsop's Third City. Famous architects have zipped in and flourished brightly coloured images that turn Croydon's pervasive grey into flashes of neon, and striven to find an inner Manhattan in its array of towers.

There have been TV shows and articles, mostly with same shtick: Croydon is sexy, really. Yet, as Emma Peters, head of planning, regeneration and conservation, pithily remarks: "Every time we have another vision we've declined economically." From 1995 to 2005, when employment in London grew by 18%, in Croydon it grew not at all.

The borough hasn't given up, however, which is why I find myself sitting with a group of planners who are trying to make the place better. Opposite me is Finn Williams, pale and delicate as a consumptive poet, who looks a decade younger than his 27 years. To one side is Vincent Lacovara, 31, and to the other Tom Sweeney, aged 35. They are describing the deals they are making with heavyweight developers, and their efforts to steer many millions of pounds of investment to beneficial effect.

Planners aren't supposed to look like this. Normally you expect them to be worn and middle-aged, and to have turned the colour of manila through blending with their environment, as certain moths come to resemble tree bark. Williams, Lacovara and Sweeney are signs of the borough's intent to do things differently. It is a long-standing ambition, given new impetus by the arrival in 2007 of Jon Rouse as the borough's chief executive. Rouse, a former chief excutive of both the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the Housing Corporation, is one of the country's more effective civil servants.

The selection of this young band of planners could just be another doomed attempt to sex up Croydon, but what is striking is their determination not to do another "vision". "Every plan for Croydon," says Williams, "has always been desperate to undo the mistakes of the previous plan." Lacovara adds: "The first question people ask when we consult them is: 'Is anything going to happen this time?'"

They embody the attitude of many young architects, which is to take things as you find them rather than impose a grand plan, and to find the spirit of the place, even if that place is not particularly charming. In the 18th century, Capability Brown talked of genius loci in the design of landscapes. These contemporary architects apply the same attitude to office blocks, rather than hills and woods. They also think there's something good about suburbs, in contrast with older architects such as Lord Rogers, for whom dense, Barcelona-like cities are everything.

In the case of Croydon the place was once delightful enough for the Archbishop of Canterbury to build his holiday home there, and it keeps fragments of its ancient past. It was then a stolid Victorian town, before the spread of London's semi-detached suburbia absorbed it into the metropolis. In the 1960s, thanks to a quirk of official policy, it boomed. The government wanted to push new office development out of the centre of London, with the result that it migrated to Croydon.

Its distinctive skyline of stubby towers was created, but when policy was reversed, so was the boom. Croydon has struggled ever since, with BT the latest business to move out. It has resumed its status as a place that prompts faint sniggers among metropolitan types, despite being the location of the world's first international airport, and the town where Malcolm McLaren pioneered punk. It may have given the world Kate Moss, but she now lives elsewhere. Terry Major-Ball, the gnome-selling brother of John Major, was the Croydon resident who stayed.

Yet it is only 15 minutes by train from central London, and the borough's mixture of suburban semis, detached houses and terraced streets mean that there are homes for every stage of life ("nursery to nursing home" as Lacovara puts it). And given the desperate hunger for homes in southern England, it can't be impossible to make it into a place where people want to live. Much of it already is, but the centre remains problematic.

Williams and co don't want to make it into something it is not, but a better version of what it is now. Their proposals are mostly quite obvious, like building a bridge across dividing railway tracks, planting trees, removing the most destructive 1960s road systems, and making it possible to access public places now cut off by roads. But they also get developers to think about what's good and/ or distinctive about Croydon, such as its tendency to place little and large buildings, and ancient and modern ones, side by side.

Above all, although they stress that previous visions left behind ideas of value, like opening up the buried river Wandle, they want something to happen this time. In this they are not just a bunch of young turks, but part of a collective effort that includes more experienced officers such as Emma Peters. This effort includes the creation of delivery vehicles and joint ventures and other devices too technical to be digested over Sunday breakfast, but none the less important. If they succeed, they could finally make Croydon an example that other towns will follow.

Why the new-look US embassy is a lump

There are some things to like about the designs for the new US embassy, unveiled last week. That it is moving from posh Mayfair to tattier Battersea is good for both places, as the residents of one hated the effects of security barriers, while the other could do with the investment.

It claims to be exceptionally green, and its architects KieranTimberlake have a record that makes this believable. The design deals with the immense security measures by trying to disguise them as landscaping, which is at least tactful, while the intricate surfaces shown in the images give an air of quality.

Yet it is a lump. A green, well-dressed, diplomatic lump, but still an ungainly, dominating object that makes minimal attempt to relate to its surroundings. There is no sense that it will join with its existing and future neighbours in creating a cohesive piece of city. It will be a singular object that will loom awkwardly over what is already a disjointed area of London.

For this blame does not only attach to the state department or the architects, but also to the inability of London's planners, from the mayor down, to plan in three dimensions. Battersea was identified as a place of opportunity under Ken Livingstone, meaning that it would be a place where office towers could flourish, yet there has been minimal investment in designing what kind of places this new development might create.

What will make this area succeed or fail is not the artistry of individual facades, but the kind of places that will be made by several buildings working together. And, yes, as many have pointed out, the embassy does look like a Norman keep, complete with moat. We all know it has to be exceptionally bomb-proof, but was it really necessary to rub this point in?

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