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Too many design exhibitions are big on architectural theory, but miss what really matters: human beings. This one is different

The problem with architecture exhibitions, so it's argued, is that they lack the one thing you really want to see: real-life buildings. I disagree. The problem with architecture exhibitions is that they fixate on trying to represent buildings that are missing. Photographs, drawings and pretentious wall texts only highlight the fact that yours is a second-hand experience. They place you in the there and then, not the here and now.

The Swiss architect Mario Botta got around this problem spectacularly in 1999 when, for the 400th anniversary of the birth of Francesco Borromini, he built a full-scale wooden model of a cross-section of the baroque master's most famous church, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. There it was in all its glory – well, half of its glory – on the shore of Lake Lugano.

Most architecture shows don't have Botta's titanic budget. But there is another way, as demonstrated at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. This is not an exhibition about what buildings look like. Gone is the blowhard shape-making and bad sculpture of the previous biennale, curated by Aaron Betsky in 2008. Neither is it didactic, like the 2006 version, curated by Richard Burdett, which was a blizzard of facts and statistics about cities – vital stuff, but rather like exploring a book pasted on the walls. Instead, this year's show is much more about what should happen inside buildings, the pure experience of space.

The person responsible is Kazuyo Sejima of Japanese practice Sanaa, the architects behind the New Museum in New York and the recent Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne. Sejima is a break from recent biennale directors in that she is a) a woman (the first, in fact) and b) a practising architect. However, perhaps her greatest strength when it comes to curating the biggest architecture show in the world is that she is not an academic. "People meet in architecture" is her theme. It sounds trite, and a little awkward, but this is rather how Sejima speaks. You're never sure whether she is stating the obvious or being incredibly profound. In this case, it seems clear the theme is one that preoccupied her in the making of the Rolex Learning Center, a university building in which there are no walls, just an undulating landscape intended to promote chance meetings between students and disciplines. It's a social education space, like Socrates's Agora but for the Facebook generation.

At the beginning of the Corderie dell'Arsenale, the epic former ropemaking factory of the Venetian navy where a biennale curator tries to make his or her case, there is a 3D movie about that campus building directed by Wim Wenders. Harking back to the famous library scene in his Wings of Desire, Wenders presents the space as a semi-sublime experience. Students free-float angelically, albeit with the slick assurance of actors in a corporate promo video. This rendition of a heavenly space sets the tone for subsequent rooms.

A number of exhibitors have created atmospheric installations that maximise the already considerable drama of this 16th-century building. The architect Tetsuo Kondo and engineers Transsolar have made a cloud with a clearly defined layer of steam floating beneath the rafters, which you can enter and exit like a plane. Almost as ineffable is Junya Ishigami's structure made of thread-like wire so as to be almost invisible. The proposition here is that structure and space (one of which normally encloses the other) can be indistinguishable – a proposition that is clearly on the edge of impossibility, so much so that, last week, it collapsed twice, once after a stray cat couldn't resist having a play (as CCTV footage later revealed).

Sejima has also invited artists to exhibit in the Arsenale. Olafur Eliasson filled his room with a sinister water feature. You enter in pitch black to the sound of water falling, and then realise through the slow strobe lighting that there are streams of it pouring from the ceiling. But instead of falling straight down they are flailing around, whipping the air like the end of a detached high-pressure hose. It's mesmerising, and I imagined people dancing under it. More serenely, Janet Cardiff has separated the voices in Thomas Tallis's Renaissance 40-part choral work Spem in Alium through 40 speakers arranged in a diamond. If you sit in the middle and close your eyes, you feel like a choir of angels is playing blind man's bluff with you.

Captivating moments, but are they architecture? One architect I spoke to felt that Eliasson's water and Transsolar's cloud were simply one-liners. I disagree. That belies how much research and experimentation it took to create them, and they prove there are ways to activate a space that makes a person stop in their tracks and feel alive. It seems clear that this is the message Sejima wants to impart.

But the biennale is not a one-woman show. As well as the main exhibition, dozens of national pavilions get to interpret her theme in their own ways, often lamely but sometimes provocatively. The Dutch pavilion, for example, has created a foam city floating in the air, representing the thousands of state-owned buildings in the Netherlands that are empty – from ex-industrial sites, to disused municipal offices and abandoned churches. People, it seems, do not always meet in architecture. Why focus on new architecture, the curators ask, when so many usable structures are going to waste? Bahrain, meanwhile, took the Golden Lion award for the best pavilion by recreating the ramshackle wooden huts that fisherman have been building on the island's waterfront. On one level, they are simply places to socialise in the open air – "The shopping malls are suffocating," says one fisherman in a video interview – but they are also poignant acts of resistance, attempts to preserve what's left of Bahrain's coastline from the high-rise builders.

For too long, architecture has been the plaything of speculators – not just property developers but city fathers commissioning signature museums as part of their global branding strategies. Buildings are not for portfolios, nor are they simply for architects to express themselves. Sejima reminds us they are for people: people with inner lives, who aren't simply units of flow. The beauty of this year's biennale is that it puts the human experience back at the heart of architecture. Inspiring places are full of spatial and sensory drama. And so are inspiring exhibitions.

Welcome to the Northerner, guardian.co.uk's weekly digest of the best of the northern press

"Huddersfield is still part of our global aspirations. It is rooted in our history." That's the kind of thing I like to hear, and it was trumpeted out over Castle Hill in the West Yorkshire town this week. The local partnership of architects that built the intriguing folly of 1899 is still in business after 175 years, and that's quite an achievement for architects; practices seldom last more than a generation; maybe two.

The Huddersfield Examiner reports how Abbey Hanson Rowe, as they were called initially, continued to prosper and has now become part of the Aedas practice (from the Latin Aedificare meaning to build), which, with main offices in London, New York and Hong Kong, is busy all over the world. Not least in Huddersfield. The context of the Castle Hill declaration, given by Aedas director Robert Grayson, is that the firm still has 90 staff working in Huddersfield, with more than 80 of them living in Kirklees, the local authority area.

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I'm not surprised by that. Anyone who knows the Pennine valleys going up from Huddersfield – Summer Wine country – would die to live there, should such a paradox be practicable. Which makes me wonder about the psychology of some BBC mandarins who seem to be making a dog's breakfast of the great relocation of major departments to Salford Quays, whose importance to us in the north cannot be overstated.

I was aghast to read on our own website about the recently appointed head of HR resigning rather than moving up here. So much so that I emailed the BBC to ask what was going on. Here's the reply:

"All our executives will be living and working in the north from day one, when our new base in Salford Quays opens next year. All BBC staff who are relocating and who own a home have the option to rent initially if they have specific circumstances that require them to keep their family home in the south-east (eg if their children will be mid-way through their A-levels), for up to two years before relocating their family home to the north. A number of more junior staff have also chosen this option and the rules are exactly the same for all.

"Peter Salmon, director of BBC North, will be living and working in Salford from day one, and he will relocate his family once his children have finished their exams, which is the commonsense thing to do. Although he would be entitled to relocation costs at that time, he has voluntarily decided to relocate at his own expense, not licence fee payers'.

"In addition, Adrian Van Klaveren, Controller of 5 Live and Richard Deverell, chief operating officer, will also be renting initially for family reasons. Others such as Joe Godwin, director of BBC Children's and Saul Nasse, controller of BBC Learning, will be moving their families from the beginning.

"Whilst executives are committed to relocating their families in the longer term, our relocation policy is designed to allow some flexibility in recognition of the impact that relocations like this can have on family life."

Keep up the pressure everyone. Of course there are family issues around relocation; but talk of 'two years' is alarming when the psychology of this move, and the commitment to real devolution of power and influence, is so crucial.

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Plenty of other new arrivals in the north clearly agree. The Southport Visiter reports that Liverpool has done even better for hotel bookings this year than in 2008, when it was European Capital of Culture – and did a famously good job of it too. Bookings in July broke all records – nearly 95,000 for events such as the Summer Pops, with Rod Stewart on the bill, and the women's open golf championship at Royal Birkdale. The city's total of hotel rooms has risen in response, from 2,650 four years ago to 4,095 now, with three planning applications for new hotels currently before the city council. They would add another 341.

It's a northern thing more widely. I went to York last night to a do at the new Cedar Court Grand hotel, which has spent £25m converting the old North Eastern railway HQ (think county hall with a medieval wall next door). It is already full every weekend, and has up to 60% occupancy during the week; and that's in a city where hotels are everywhere. Please keep them coming.

Incidentally, the subtly differently named Southport Visitor website intrigued me with what appeared to be a candidate for Most Locally Local Story of the Year: "Free parking space on Albert Road". But if you click here you'll see the enjoyable point.

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It's always good to spot local dialect in local papers, even if those of us who don't live there have to reach for the dictionary or Wikipedia. Take the case of Hayley Revell, who writes the Running with Revell column in North Tyneside's News Guardian. She isn't running just now, because of a spelk.

That's Geordie for a splinter, which in Hayley's case was more exotic than usual. She went on a boat trip while on holiday in Turkey, dived in and hit her foot on a rock. When it was still hurting on her return to Newcastle, she went to the doctor, she says, "with what I thought was a posh spelk".

The canny doctor recognised the scrap as coral – impressively for Tyneside, where you don't see much of the stuff. So Hayley's off for an anaesthetic and removal of the pretty but razor-sharp object – in time, she hopes, for her charity go at the Great North Run on 19 September.

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Exotic news now from Louth, where the local Leader has reported monkey sightings two weeks running. Both were made by local police constables, starting with neighbourhood response officer Paul French, who had to brake sharply at South Cockerington when the small beast scampered out in front of his car.

"I thought it was a squirrel at first," he told the Leader. "It was a similar size, but was dark brown in colour and had a long, straight, upright tail. It paused for a moment standing on its hind legs, looked at me, then scampered off over the hedge."

Curiously, I saw what I thought was a dead monkey on the A64 road from Leeds to the hotel do in York (a road to avoid until after the Leeds Festival, which sees colourful and genial but chaotic traffic in the run-up to the bank holiday weekend). So I spent quite a lot of time on the phone to Lincolnshire police, checking out other possible sightings.

There haven't been any, but the police pointed me in the direction of BBC Lincolnshire's website, which has certainly gone the extra mile on the story. Its reporters checked the local East Lindsey district council's records of monkey licences held under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, found there was only one, and established that its monkey is where it should be – at home.

The mystery therefore continues, as does the identity of my roadside corpse. Further news on either welcome.

Martin Wainwright recommends

Bank holiday offers innumerable attractions in the north, but I'll plump for the chance to be served cream teas all day. This is at Fountains Abbey, the world heritage site in North Yorkshire, which holds a Georgian Day on Sunday, with music and dancing in the lovely water gardens.

In a week that sees the uninviting prospect of an English Defence League demonstration in Bradford, I'd also warmly recommend the Community Celebration organised in response. It's called Be Bradford – Peaceful Together and takes place in Infirmary Fields on Westgate from midday to 4pm. Plus an excellent book by an almost-contestant in Big Brother from that great city, Mahmud Khan. Called The Logic of Half a Moustache, it has the wit, fun and friendliness so under-reported in pieces about Bradford's Muslim community, and you can get it from mahmudkhan.com

• This article was amended on 27 August 2010. The original named an Aedas director as Richard Grayson, and said that the firm was American-led. This has been corrected.

The city's avant-garde masterpieces are falling into ruin. It seems only the oligarchs' wives can save them

From the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Moskva river towards the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour you normally have a clear view of the Kremlin. But for several days last week its fairytale towers had disappeared behind an acrid grey pall. With the thermometer stuck at a record-shattering 40C and the smog hidden by smoke from the burning marshes outside the city, this was a hellish Moscow that none of its residents had ever seen before.

I was in the city to give a talk at a new school, the Strelka Institute of Architecture, Media and Design. Located just across the river from the cathedral, the Strelka occupies the garages of the former Red October chocolate factory, which until two years ago had been producing chocolate on that site since the late 19th century. The school only opened earlier this summer but already it's one of the liveliest nightspots in the city, with film screenings, clubs and a restaurant frequented by Moscow's glamorous media set. If you're thinking that this doesn't sound much like a school, then you'd have a point, but we'll address that later. In all other senses the sight of a former industrial complex being turned into a cultural hotspot is one that we've been accustomed to in Europe and the US for several decades. In Russia, however, it's a more recent phenomenon.

One reason is that the gradual switch from an industrial to a services economy didn't begin until the Yeltsin years. And it was only around the turn of the millennium that developers started to speculate on factories (the more unscrupulous ones earned the description "raiders"). The other factor in the slow speed of the post-industrial project is that the Russians appear to value new things more than old ones.

Any sightseers embarking on a tour of Moscow's avant-garde architecture from the early 20th century had better brace themselves for a catalogue of degradation. The more hallowed the building in the architectural history books, the greater its decrepitude. Take the Narkomfin building, designed by Moisei Ginzburg with Ignaty Milnis in 1928 to house the workers of the commissariat of finance. This radical apartment block, which spearheaded the idea of collective living, is one of the most important surviving constructivist buildings. And it is literally crumbling – indeed it's in such a sorry state that I was amazed to find that people still live in it. Then there is another constructivist masterpiece, Konstantin Melnikov's Rusakov workers' club of 1929, with its muscular geometric profile. It's still as dramatic as ever but empty now except for an Azerbaijani restaurant that has attached its own folksy timber entrance (with lurid neon signage) to the unforgettable facade.

But it is not just the early modernist heritage of Moscow that is unloved. Even the pride of a more recent Soviet past is going to seed. The All-Russia Exhibition Centre (VDNKh), the expo site in the north of the city that was a town-sized advertisement of Soviet achievements, is today a rather seedy theme park. None of its grandiose pavilions still contain anything worth seeing. The grandest, announced by a Tupolev rocket in the forecourt, is the 1966 Space Pavilion. It now houses a garden centre that would embarrass your average parish hall, let alone this vaulted cathedral to the Soviet space programme. Under the dome, the giant portrait of Yuri Gagarin has a sheet draped over it. I asked a local why and he answered simply: "Shame." It would dishonour the legendary cosmonaut to look out over this mess.

This is the climate in which the Russian post-industrial project is taking shape. Preservation is not a major preoccupation here, which is ironic considering that much of the post-communist architecture has been built to look old (it's known unofficially as the "Luzhkov style", after Moscow's long-serving mayor). And yet one fifth of Moscow is made up of industrial sites – think of the impact that Tate Modern had on London's cultural scene and then imagine how much potential Moscow has. But destroy-and-rebuild is the model favoured here, with over 1,000 historical buildings knocked down in the last decade. There's no pressure from heritage bodies and no incentives to convert industrial buildings. Indeed, there tend to be disincentives, such as the regulation that only new buildings can qualify for class A office status. It's no wonder that developers have been either demolishing the factories to build luxury apartment blocks or turning them into business parks.

In the last few years, however, things have started to change. For one thing, the recession has put the brakes on developers, allowing nimbler entrepreneurs to slip in. The Red October factory, for instance, was meant to be turned into a luxury residential zone called Golden Island, with buildings by Norman Foster (much beloved of Russia) and Jean Nouvel. Only the credit crunch enabled the Strelka's founders to lease their site. But there is also a new player on the Moscow property scene: the oligarch's wife, who knows only too well from the international circuit how to turn defunct industry into cultural prestige. One such is Dasha Zhukova, Roman Abramovich's wife, who two years ago turned Melnikov's temple-like Bakhmetevsky bus garage of 1927 into an art centre called Garage. Last week it was holding a Rothko retrospective, the kind of show that normally only major museums can handle.

On a grander scale, though less refined architecturally, are the cultural developments in the Kursky industrial area. Here there is Winzavod, a red-brick wine factory built in the 1860s. It was bought by Roman Trotsenko to turn into offices but again his wife, Sofia, saw the potential for a cultural centre. Today it's full of galleries, showrooms and creative studio spaces. And right next door to it is what used to be the Arma gasworks, which supplied the gas for Moscow's streetlights. Now its four brick gasometers are home to a clutch of nightclubs, creative agencies and publishing houses. In a strange hangover from Soviet bureaucracy, you have to show your passport to enter and you're not allowed to take photographs, which somehow is not quite in the spirit of the place.

Here's the question: is it to be left to the oligarchs' wives to deliver on all this potential cultural programming? One Muscovite I met referred to Garage and Vinzavod rather dismissively as "toys for rich people". "Still," he added, "they could just be buying more yachts."

Perhaps the Strelka offers a different model. The founders of this postgraduate design school, with a curriculum designed by Rem Koolhaas, are at least using their wealth to invest in the next generation. And one way that they are making the school's name (while recouping some funds) is as a social hotspot. In fact, the Strelka is the kind of hybrid that could probably only exist in the turbo-capitalist experiment of Moscow: one part ideology, one part philanthropy (the education will be free) and one part the place to be seen. If the school succeeds, then while Russia may have come late to the post-industrial party, it will have contributed something new to the rather predictable formats we know so well in Europe. Meanwhile, locals are paying it a classic Muscovite compliment: "It's so not like Moscow."

You don't have to go abroad to find beautiful art and architecture. Much of what you see in Italy and France is mirrored right here in Britain

The ideology of art today, according to most artists, curators and critics, is one that values the familiar. Ordinary objects, everyday pictures, and accessible artists who seem not that different from ourselves are praised, endlessly. The artist next door whose work portrays the average life in the average town is what we are told to admire.

This is why I never can content myself with the modern British art scene. I want art to be elsewhere, I want to travel in search of it. I need it to be exotic, and to show me other worlds, other lives, other times and places. The first exhibitions I saw were in France and Italy, on childhood holidays. Maybe that's why I associate the best art experiences with travel. But what happens in times like these, when many people can't afford to travel abroad? Can there be an art staycation?

I recently heard a talk about John Piper by art historian Frances Spalding . This British painter started as a fully paid up international modernist before turning inward, to the English landscape. In the 1940s he portrayed, eloquently, the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and other bombed churches . Spalding illuminated the reasons – at a time of national crisis, with war blazing overhead – for Piper's choice of a consciously parochial art.

As a journalist I can see Piper's point. Britain is full of hidden beauties. The talk I heard about Piper was at Dartington Hall in Devon, an amazingly well-preserved medieval hall. It would also be possible to argue that much of what you see in Venice can be mirrored in Britain. The glories of Venetian Gothic are much-praised – but what about the English perpendicular? I mean, you can go to Canterbury, visit the cathedral, see all the gothic and Romanesque you like, and then go to the beach in Broadstairs – what more could anyone want?

Palladio's church in Venice glistens like a pearl set in an exquisite shell – but the real star is the architect and his vision

I saw a lot of great art on a recent trip to Venice. But the masterpiece I can't get out of my mind is not a painting, a mosaic, or a sculpture. It is a church. Palladio's Redentore glistens on the horizon when you look across to the long strip of land called the Giudecca. Take the boat there and you discover a pearl set in an exquisite shell. As clean as the sky, the facade of Palladio's 16th-century temple (architects then thought of their churches as "temples") seems not so much to have been built as sculpted: as if it were a model of a building, exquisitely carved from a single piece of marble. Niches for statues, and the statues themselves, are as perfectly calibrated to the overall design as are the rusticated stones around the base of the building.

Inside, the beauty accelerates to Stendhal syndrome extremes. Every detail is a part of the whole, and the whole has a perfection that seems absurdly elegant: the rim of the central dome is not just a circle. It is an absolutely precise geometrical circle – it does not appear to wobble at any point. How can a line cut by masons and suspended in the sky be so exact?

Renaissance architecture is astonishingly modern. In the works of Palladio and Michelangelo, the architect becomes a self-conscious creative star. The Redentore exhibits not just fine craft but, unmistakably, a tightly organised, intense and supremely confident artistic vision. This "auteur" quality (to borrow a term from film critics) is what makes the Redentore so gripping and dramatic.

Palladio and Michelangelo both in their different ways anticipate the architecture of today. Should architects be able to define the ways museums present art? The question often asked of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim and its offspring was first raised by Michelangelo's master plan for the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Should an architect's personal dream be imposed on the skyline? Can that be good for a city? The Redentore says yes. Modern architecture starts here.

The mayor's deal has smothered London's public spaces with what may be the largest piece of corporate branding in existence

London's long-awaited cycle-hire scheme is launched this week. While there's no doubt it's a valuable addition to the capital's public transport options, it strikes yet another blow to the idea of London as a dignified city. First of all, there's the name. Paris has the Velib, Montreal has the Bixi; what does London get? Barclays Cycle Hire. Clearly the good people at Barclays marketing thought long and hard about that one.

Maybe it's not worth getting too wound up about the name – selling the rights to popular institutions is unlikely to make anyone who watches, say, the Barclays Premier League or the Npower Championship even blink. What is new, however, is the prospect of more than a hundred kilometres of the capital's road surface being branded with corporate livery. The city's new dedicated cycle lanes – two of which recently opened, with another ten to come before the Olympics – are called "Barclays Cycle Superhighways" and painted Barclays blue.

London can now claim the dubious honour of hosting what is surely the largest piece of corporate branding in existence. It's not just the scale, the mind-blowing square footage, that is shocking about this – it's the principle. We're not talking about some supersized billboard here: we're talking about the mayor selling off the very road beneath our wheels – one of the few parts of a city that counts indisputably as public space. Whether they realise it or not, whether or not they even care, from now on thousands of cyclists are doomed to commute on a giant Barclays ad.

The sponsorship deal, worth £25m, has been presented as a coup for Boris Johnson. It has enabled him to recover some of the £140m Transport for London spent on the cycle-hire scheme and has even been presented as "payback" for the mayor's support of the banks during the credit crunch. Surely, however, £25m is a small price to pay for such an invasive piece of branding? If a city of the global stature of London can't afford to provide rental bikes without turning its urban fabric into a massive endorsement, we're in trouble.

There is something, too, in the gibes suggesting this is not just Barclays blue but Tory blue. Neither New Labour nor former mayor Ken Livingstone did anything to prevent the growing privatisation of the city, but it is hard to imagine Livingstone selling off a chunk of the public realm in such brazen fashion. Johnson seemingly lacks any sensitivity to the ethical or aesthetic side-effects of his deal-making – this is, after all, the man who condemned the Stratford Olympics site to a hideous 115m-high sculpture – precisely the kind of vainglorious ego trip the Olympics can do without – based on a 45-second chat with Britain's richest man in the cloakroom at Davos. We must be careful not to assume a loss of innocence; private ownership and interests have held sway in this city for centuries, and often cooperation between private and public bodies is the best way to meet the city's needs. However, the public realm that the Victorians handed over to municipal authorities to manage in the public good – including streets and pavements, squares, and infrastructure such as transport and sewage networks – has been under steady assault since the privatisation of the Thatcher years.

A decade ago, Naomi Klein argued in her book No Logo that we had reached a point where it seemed nothing could happen anymore without a corporate sponsor. The inevitable upshot of their growing social power was that brands wanted an expanded visual presence. T-shirt logos and media advertisements were no longer enough: branding had to be a fully immersive experience. As the superhighways prove, there is no amount of space a brand will not happily fill, with public bodies all too willing to hand it over. TfL is becoming ever more imaginative about the bits of Tube stations it will sell off to advertisers – including, now, the space between escalators and the gates of the exit barriers. Every year the Regent Street Christmas lights, once a public gesture organised by the Regent Street Association, turn a major thoroughfare into a 3D advert for some fashion label or blockbuster movie.

Increasingly entire pieces of London have become brands in their own right, a process that began in the 1980s with the privately owned Canary Wharf development. Since then, so-called "business improvement districts" have been popping up all over the capital under the banner of regeneration: Broadgate in the City, Paddington Basin, Kings Cross Central, the new Spitalfields Market, the More London development near Tower Bridge. It's a national phenomenon, too, exemplified by "malls without walls" such as Liverpool ONE or Brindleyplace in Birmingham. They might look like other parts of the city, but they are very different. Stroll through Broadgate and you'll notice the logo of developer British Land studding the pavements. These are privately owned developments, policed by private security guards who can throw you out for the slightest misdemeanour or – if you happen to be sleeping rough, say – simply for disrupting the projection of affluence. In the case of More London – a series of sterile glass blocks set amid some rather uptight landscaping on the South Bank – the very name is a deliberate deception. The developers are trying to claim this is just an ordinary piece of the city. Don't believe it.

Anyone who wants to find out more about the insidious privatisation of British cities should read Anna Minton's latest book, Ground Control. The point is that we are in danger or running out of unbranded space. Though it may seem innocuous, the branding of cycle lanes sets an all-too-exploitable precedent. As citizens we have a communal birthright, which includes the public realm. Our representatives are supposed to protect that – not sell it off to corporations who are neither responsible nor accountable for the spaces of which they claim symbolic ownership. Politicians seem only too ready to turn our cities into horizontal billboards. If we're not vigilant, the urban landscape is going to become a brandscape.

The man who designed the Royal Shakespeare Theatre fears the UK is sailing into the architectural doldrums, but is this such a bad thing?

The idea that we have now seen the last of the great, prestige architectural projects of the last 10 years has provoked a strong, if divided response.

The debate started at the weekend when Rab Bennetts, the architect behind the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, said he feared the UK is sailing into the architectural doldrums. At the same time, though, he conceded that some of the landmark building projects that changed the skyline of our cities in the past 10 years were perhaps excessive, or even gratuitous.

After reading his words, several architects and built-environment enthusiasts have contacted me to say they think the great edifices of the Blair/Millennium era, such as Glasgow's Armadillo, the refurbished Covent Garden opera house, Cardiff's Senedd, Gateshead's Sage, and the Scottish Parliament are all vainglorious follies. One used the phrase "white elephants". Others have argued it is all just part of the natural cycle of boom and bust, so we should treat a coming architectural drought like any other period of bad weather: grin and bear it?

Bennetts, though, believes the consequences of a fallow period are more serious. He argues the whole industry will suffer, not just architects. A slow down like this means long-term economic damage. For him the worry is that, along with all the prestige projects put on hold because there are no private funds to match lottery grants, the freeze on public service projects, such as school maintenance and hospital redevelopment, will hit our social infrastructure for years to come.

On a more positive note, I hear that Bennetts Associates handed over the newly remodelled Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford on Friday, on time and within its budget. This surely makes this major part-lottery-funded scheme more of a flying pig than a white elephant.

Unsurprisingly, the lead letter in today's Daily Telegraph sticks up for Prince Charles and his "unexpected and unwelcome" covert interventions in the Chelsea Barracks saga. I'm more impressed, however, by the subtler message of the fourth one down. It's from Geoffrey Shaw of South Croydon:

Sir - How very unfortunate that Charles II did not share his successor's views on modern architecture. His influence during the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire could have resulted in giving Londoners the cathedral with which they would really have been comfortable – a nice, familiar, Gothic "retro" building, rather than the monstrous carbuncle that now defaces the top of Ludgate Hill, built by that upstart young mathematician Wren.

Harrumph. Frightful business.

I may have had my doubts about its recent refurb, but this Oxford museum now ranks among the world's greatest, as a dazzling new archaeological exhibition proves

After its ambitious renovation, Oxford's Ashmolean Museum has begun to look like a major museum in a major city. The gallery has a world-class collection, encompassing the archaeological treasures of Lord Arundel and Arthur Evans, the cabinet of curiosities of Elias Ashmole, and one of the most fascinating Renaissance paintings anywhere, Piero di Cosimo's Forest Fire.

Still, I wasn't sure about the refit when I made my first visit to the reopened museum recently. I liked the old place. Now, there is in effect a new building inserted into its centre, with a light-filled and spectacular atrium linking galleries reimagined as a tour of world cultures, constantly stressing east-west connections and global views. I found it a bit loud, to be honest. The displays are didactic in a way that is, at times, a bit intrusive – in the Roman gallery, for example, where a massive illuminated map of the Roman empire distracts you from the old stuff in cases at the sides.

But I soon cheered up. Everything is beautifully lit, clearly captioned and inviting. Superb Greek vases held me entranced. The current exhibition, The Lost World of Old Europe, is a brilliant survey of a neolithic culture that achieved very high levels of sculpture, including rare models of prehistoric houses. The Danube valley, it turns out, is one of the true cradles of humanity. The ceramics here are of a very high quality – often voluptuously beautiful – and this simple, serious archaeological encounter demonstrates that this museum is far from selling its intellectual soul.

The Ashmolean joins other museums around the country, from Manchester to Cambridge, that have turned themselves into dazzling culture palaces that rival the rich city museums of the US. I am glad so much renewal has been achieved by museums during the good times – it will give them some ballast in the rocky years ahead.

Broadcasting Place is 'up there' - if not in height then in stature - with some of the largest towers in the world

A 23-storey tower in Leeds has been recognised as the 'best tall building' in Europe.

The Independent reports that Broadcasting Place in Woodhouse Lane - which stands less than 70m tall and is made of deliberately rusted steel - has just been bracketed with three megastructures as one of the four best towers erected in 2010.

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) decided that the building, designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, was more than equal to some of the largest and most impressive structures built by man.

The other buildings garlanded by the CTBUH are a trio of the usual suspects: the Burj Khalifa in Dubai which, at 828m, is more than 11 times higher than Broadcasting Place; the 163m Pinnacle@Duxton in Singapore and the 366m Bank of America tower in New York.

The award has already caused a lively debate in this office - personally I'm not a great fan of Broadcasting Place, but others think it's a great achievement and puts Leeds on the map.

What do you think? Have your say in the comments section below.