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A 20 metre high Thomas Heatherwick structure at Shanghai Expo will show Britain at the cutting edge in design and business

Britain may have spawned the Swinging Sixties, punk, Cool Britannia and numerous hot designers in the past 50 years, but for many Chinese, it's still a place where Oliver Twist is stumbling through a pea-souper, and horsedrawn carriages clatter along the cobbles.

The British government has set itself the task of changing that perception forever, by wowing the 70 million visitors to this year's Shanghai Expo — with a £25m see-through "seed cathedral".

British designer Thomas Heatherwick, known for distinctive works such as Manchester's The B of the Bang, has created a 20 metre high building made up of 60,000 transparent acrylic filaments, each of which holds a seed from Kew Gardens' huge Millennium Seed Bank – a worldwide project to preserve a quarter of the world's plant species.

The government, which has stumped up most of the £25m cost of the project, hopes that as the 7.5 metre long spikes sway gently in the breeze, potential Chinese investors will be inspired to bring their business to Britain, UK exporters will be inspired to strike up new contacts, and Chinese students will be attracted to the idea of studying here.

"The Chinese view of Britain is a rather old-fashioned one; it's all to do with Britain as being a heritage country, a traditional economy – there's an awful lot of cobblestones and fog," said Sir Andrew Cahn, director of UK Trade and Investment, which has the job of promoting Britain abroad. "We think of Britain as a cutting-edge, forward-looking country."

Having just returned from seeing the pavilion almost completed in Shanghai last week, Cahn said he was uncharacteristically passionate. "I'm a world-weary 58-year-old civil servant not given to enthusiasms, but I got very excited about this building."

Heatherwick said the brief laid down by the Chinese organisers of the Expo was, "Better City, Better Life," and he had been inspired by the fact that – despite its reputation for fog and Victorian grime – Britain pioneered public parks and botanical gardens. "Each of these tiny little seeds has boundless potential - to feed us, to cure disease - and that seemed to be a good symbol for the British contribution," he said.

Heatherwick is perhaps best known for "B of the Bang," the 56 metre high metal starburst built to mark the Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002, which had to be dismantled last year amid safety fears about its giant metal spikes.

UKTI plans to hold more than a hundred business events in Shanghai and other Chinese cities during the six months of the Expo, and the pavilion's five private sector sponsors, including drug firm AstraZeneca and Barclays bank, will be able to use its "VIP rooms" to hold meetings.

China is spending $55bn (£35bn) – more than twice the cost of the Beijing Olympics – on the monumental Shanghai showcase, which will include almost 250 pavilions, and is expected to draw up to 70 million visitors.

British business has been criticised for being slow to realise the potential of the rapidly expanding Chinese market, which the government believes will be critical for helping to generate a solid recovery from the deepest recession in a generation.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Business, China, Design, guardian.co.uk, News, Shanghai, World news

Environmental group says the plan will create a legal headache for any government pushing ahead with airport's expansion

Environmental activists have invited some of the UK's leading architects to design an "impenetrable fortress" to be built on land earmarked for the third runway at Heathrow.

Greenpeace plans to build the winning design at the centre of the site where airport operator BAA hopes to construct a £7bn runway and a sixth terminal.

The charity bought the parcel of land last year and then distributed ownership to more than 60,000 supporters around the world.

Organisers say the small individual plots will create a legal headache for any government trying to push ahead with the expansion plans.

The Sheet Architecture News Activism, Air transport, Airline industry, Architecture, Business, Climate change, Environment, Greenpeace, guardian.co.uk, Heathrow third runway, News, UK news

Former RBS chief gets first role since bank taken into government control at height of credit crunch

Sir Fred Goodwin, former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, has swapped banking for architecture to secure his first role since being ousted from the bank during the October 2008 taxpayer bailout.

He has been hired in an advisory capacity by RMJM, the Edinburgh-based firm involved in designing the Scottish parliament which was completed 10 times over budget and three years late.

It is understood that Goodwin, 51, has been working behind the scenes for RMJM for a number of weeks and that his involvement was only revealed when it was announced internally yesterday.

His appointment was immediately met with surprise. Lord Oakeshott, Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said: "It is a strange business decision. I can't believe it will open doors for any contracts paid for by the British ratepayer or taxpayer."

Under the stewardship of Goodwin RBS became the fifth largest bank in the world, only to collapse into the hands of the taxpayer after the disastrous acquisition of the Dutch bank ABN at the end of 2007 just as the credit crunch started to grip the financial markets.

He was hounded out of his native Scotland to a hideaway in the south of France after the furore over his £16.9m pension pot which was later halved under pressure from the government and the new manage­ment of the bank. Goodwin returned to Scotland six months ago after agreeing to reduce his payout.

The taxpayer is still on the hook for as much as £54bn after bailing out RBS, which was crippled by bad investments in its investment banking arm. The ­government owns 84% of the shares which are currently worth less than it paid for them.

The architects, whose initials stand for Robert Matthew Johnson ­Marshall, said Goodwin had been hired for his international experience.

"We have appointed Sir Fred as an adviser to the business. Working closely with our executive team, Fred will be advising on our ongoing international strategy. He has a huge amount of international business experience. This is a rare [skill] set and one which is valuable and relevant to RMJM," the firm said.

Goodwin is not the first of the bankers involved in the crisis to take steps to rehabilitate themselves. Andy Hornby – his counterpart at HBOS, which had to be rescued by Lloyds – is now chief executive of the pharmacy chain Alliance Boots, which is owned by a private equity firm.

Goodwin's former colleague Johnny Cameron, who ran the RBS investment bank, has not been as fortunate. His attempts to return to the City at the investment bank Greenhill were derailed by the Financial Services Authority while his role at headhunters Odgers Berndtson only lasted a week. He resigned after UK Financial Investments, the body responsible for looking after the taxpayer stake in RBS, pulled a contract from the headhunters.

A spokesman for Goodwin said the former banker did not want to make any comment on his role at RMJM, which is currently involved in building the Commonwealth games athletes' village in Glasgow.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Business, Credit crunch, News, Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotland, Sir Fred Goodwin, The Guardian, UK news

Dubai's stunning 828m skyscraper is an ideal monument for an era of credit-fuelled over-consumption – irresponsible and unsustainable

Dubai defies logic. Skyscrapers rear up out of the pitiless desert where, a generation ago, there was only wind-blown litter. This city-state confected from subsistence has now witnessed the opening of the world's tallest building – the Burj Khalifa, steel-ribbed, glass-clad and completely unsustainable.

The 828m (2,717 foot) skyscraper boasts the world's highest swimming pool and mosque and is said to contain enough glass to cover 17 football pitches. Not since 1311, when the spire of Lincoln Cathedral first topped the Great Pyramid of Giza, has the tallest structure in the world been located in the Arab world. Some Arabs, not unreasonably, interpret criticism of the building as resentment at Dubai's presumption in setting itself up as a world city.

Stunningly designed by the Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrell, the Burj Khalifa is inspired not only by minarets and desert flowers, but also by Frank Lloyd Wright's 1956 plans for the Illinois Sky-City in Chicago. Neither the technology nor the money existed then to build such a structure. Now that it does, Dubai would like to see its audacious building as a metaphor for its role in the vanguard of globalisation, as a technocracy capable of yoking Islam and modernity.

The symbol, though, is already tarnished. Before and during construction, the building was called the Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower); its website still is. The surrounding area was to have been known as Downtown Burj Dubai. But at Monday night's launch, the name was abruptly changed to Burj Khalifa, in honour of the president of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

Last month, Abu Dhabi gave Dubai $10bn to stave off financial collapse. The name-change suggests the bailout may have come with conditions and that Dubai's blander, richer neighbour may now exert some influence over its anything-and-everything-for-sale mentality.

In the space of one year, Dubai has gone from having the world's best performing property market to one of the worst. The Burj Khalifa's developers insist that 90% of its 900 apartments are sold and its 300,000 square feet of office space filled. In fact, most of the apartments were bought at the height of the market by speculators. And while a way may be found, for the sake of face, to occupy the office space, elsewhere in Dubai large tracts lie empty.

It is impossible to get accurate information about this; Dubai is an opaque place, where the line between government and private enterprise is blurred. What we do know is that little attention was paid in the boom years to the social or environmental consequences of development. All but 10% of the population of Dubai are expatriates, whose interests really lie elsewhere. The government featherbeds its few citizens but offers its majority of foreign inhabitants little more than a dream of making money, encouraging a short-term approach to the place. Certainly, it wants no political or civic engagement from them.

Many of Dubai's construction workers live on starvation wages: £120 a month on average for a six-day week, with shifts of up to 12 hours. Housemaids can endure conditions approaching slavery. Laws exist to regulate working conditions and to prevent employers from seizing workers' passports, but they are not well enforced. Government figures are invariably owners, partners or shareholders in private companies. You only have to travel an hour into the desert to see the construction workers' shanty towns to get a sense of what life is like for those who are building Dubai's skyscrapers, but few do.

Construction workers on the Burj Khalifa have rioted on several occasions, including in March 2006, when 2,500 protested at the site, and again in November 2007. A Human Rights Watch survey found a cover-up of deaths from heat, overwork and suicide in the emirate. The Indian consulate recorded 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005, after which they were asked to stop counting.

Meanwhile, the Burj Khalifa's air-conditioning system is said to be the equivalent of melting 12,500 tons of ice a day, in a city that has the world's highest per capita carbon footprint. Dubai relies heavily on CO₂-emitting desalination plants. The Tiger Woods golf course alone requires 4m gallons of water a day. Short-term profits have repeatedly been put before sustainability.

There remains an outside chance that the emirate may yet become capable of combining development with equity, transparency and environmental sustainability. But at the moment, Dubai is built entirely on a capitalism whose nakedness is clothed only in bling. And if that continues, the Burj Khalifa will stand as a symbol of a meretricious, credit-fuelled era in which no one with any choice would wish to live.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Burj Khalifa, Business, Culture, Dubai, Features, The Observer, World news

Developer claims almost all the 1,000 apartments in the 818m high Burj Dubai have already been sold

The world's tallest building, the Burj Dubai, officially opens its doors tomorrow, leaving a colossal reminder of the hubris that
brought the emirate crashing in November.

The $4.1bn building is 818 metres (2,684ft) high, has more than 160 floors and will boast the world's highest observation deck. More than 50 lifts travelling at 25mph, will take two minutes to reach the top.

Developer Emaar Properties claims that almost all the 1,000 or so residential apartments in the tower have already been sold, in defiance of a property crash that saw prices drop by 50% last year. Laden with debt, Dubai was last month forced to accept a $10bn bailout from neighbouring Abu Dhabi.

During Dubai's boom years, developers built increasingly outlandish schemes including the "seven-star" hotel Burj Al Arab and a 22,500 sq m ski resort on the edge of the desert. Work on an archipelego of man-made islands in the shape of the world's land masses has been suspended due to the financial crisis.

The Burj is more than 300 metres higher than its nearest rival, the Taipei 101. The tallest tower in the United States, the Willis Tower in Chicago (formerly known as the Sears Tower), is 442m high. Rival developer Nakheel announced plans to trump the Burj with a tower reaching 1km, but with its parent Dubai World admitting last year that it was unable to repay its debts, the plans are likely to remain on the drawing board.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Burj Khalifa, Business, Culture, Dubai, Dubai World, Global economy, Global recession, News, The Observer, World news

The 818-metre tower is a true wonder of the world, a fitting monument to Dubai as the capital of excess and irrational exuberance

The scaffolding has cleared from the most astonishing man-made structure I have seen. It is outrageous, wasteful, egotistical, ridiculous; but ask if the Burj Dubai is beautiful and I cannot deny it. When it formally opens (mostly empty) early next year, this Dubai tower will, at 818 metres, be the highest building anywhere, its "sneer of cold command" thrusting a finger at the outside world even as its Ozymandian surroundings sink beneath the economic waters of the Gulf.

With the Dubai property market plummeting, the Burj is the final grandiose gesture of the emirate's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, on his long campaign to make Ludwig of Bavaria seem like a jobbing builder on the North Circular Road.

Unlike most new skyscrapers, the $8bn (£5bn) Burj Dubai does not rise until the point where an accountant calculates the lifts can take no more. Its 20-acre base has the plan of a six-leaf desert flower, from which it launches itself into the sky in a diminishing cluster of rocket-like cylinders, spiralling and soaring to a celestial climax.

This is no pastiche Mies, pastiche Corb, pastiche Foster, like the postmodern blobs, slices, wedges and cornets that crowd every Gulf skyline, screaming "look-at-me" at the brain-dulled passerby. Burj Dubai, designed by the Chicagoan architect, Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and closely watched by the sheikh himself, leads the eye ever upwards. It has the exhilaration of a Gothic spire. At the top, a spike rises further, swaying 1.5 metres in the wind and appearing to bend towards the viewer, as if appalled at its own presumption in puncturing the heavens.

Dubai this week lay in the shadow of its new tower, a partygoer still dancing in the streets hours after the party has ended. Its hyperbolic malls are crowded, its freeways jammed and its latest attention-grabber, an international film festival, mobbed by crowds. On Monday Dubai's more sober neighbour, Abu Dhabi, tossed its defaulting property market a $10bn note for one last drink, with another $1bn in pocket money for the embarrassed Maktoum family.

The sheikh's obedient media barely mentioned the humiliation, as a drunk cares not who pays for the last round. The construction sites, once host to a quarter of the world's cranes, are mostly still building, but no one holds out much hope for the sea-girt ocean palms and "cities" planned at the height of the most reckless property bubble in history. The chairman of Dubai World, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, might cry earlier this year, "Dubai has a vision like no other place on earth," but it is a vision few want to share just now.

A quarter of new residential units stand empty and 34,000 are still under construction. Nothing is heard now of a plan to build a tower higher even than Burj Dubai in the port area. An archipelago in the form of a map of the world remains as piles of sand offshore, crazily shipped like coals to Newcastle from Australia and rumoured to have disgorged antipodean snakes into the Gulf. The capital of irrational exuberance has embarked on an almighty hangover.

Since I have long seen Dubai as a speculative accident waiting to happen, I could not resist a debate on its future, held on Monday in the rival statelet of Qatar up the coast – and held with not a little schadenfreude. Dubai's protestation of open markets, an open society and western freedoms have long been absurd. Its rulers reacted to the debate (broadcast next month by BBC World) by trying to have the Qataris suppress it and ensuring that three Dubai speakers and all Dubai journalists boycotted it.

This was absurdly self-defeating, since a motion critical of Dubai's breakneck expansion was defeated 60-40. Twitter and Facebook were flooded with the good news for Dubai, in a week when there had been precious little. Yet none of this was allowed to be reported in Dubai's censored media. Never were so many well-groomed heads buried in so much desert sand.

The surest sign of a polity that has lost confidence in itself is when its rulers cannot tolerate a debate on its affairs. Even the word default has had to be replaced in the Dubai press by "debt restructuring" or "new legal framework". Outsiders are routinely blamed for the property market collapse, which the emirate's buccaneers and paid stooges have for years been stoking with hyperbole. Property values are reported to be 50% down from their peak and are predicted by UBS analysts to be heading for 75%. Those who mimicked the 17th-century Dutch who believed that tulip prices could never fall are left with the paranoid's last gasp, blaming foreigners for their woes.

The most mesmerising thing about Dubai is not its present but its future. Will it be Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat or Fatehpur Sikri? Will it become a place of sand and weeds, so many "trunkless legs of stone" lost on a scorching Gulf shore?

What will happen when the world's funny money starts to flow elsewhere? What happens when a future sheikh goes either environmental or religious and tires of boosterism, returning to tents and camels, to order and respect for his ancestors? What happens when some political whirlwind sweeps across the Gulf from Iran, or down from Iraq, or across from Saudi Arabia?

At a certain point in the decline in property values, it no longer pays owners to maintain lifts, services and utilities (as on a British tower estate). More likely Dubai will be a desert Detroit, a place of widespread dereliction with some money remaining at the centre but with ghost towns and squatted housing in the sweltering suburbs. The smart money is already on the more cautiously developed Qatar and Abu Dhabi stealing its financial thunder and leaving Dubai with its bizarre hotels: Las Vegas to Los Angeles, or Atlantic City to New York.

There is a touch of Vegas to the gold-plated atrium of the "seven star" Burj Al-Arab hotel, with its casino baroque and computerised fountains like leaping dolphins. There is more than a touch of Disney to the $1.5bn Atlantis hotel, opened this year by Kylie Minogue, with shark-filled aquarium wall, garden gnome interior and giant conches for capitals.

Already the office towers of Dubai look like those of a pre-cyber age, when the rich had to live near the oil, and celebrities could be induced to buy off-plan and sell before the fireworks ended. Why live in Dubai and shop at an ersatz Harvey Nichols when you can live in Knightsbridge and shop at the real one?

Dubai is a gaseous burp about to explode in the desert air. But when it explodes it will leave behind the sensational Burj, standing visible across the desert, gleaming proudly in the sun. One day the cost of keeping it up will exceed its income, its steel will rot and the swaying summit will become dangerous. The mother of all demolitions will have to begin. Then Shelley can have his moment and Ozymandias his epitaph. But for the time being Dubai can at least boast a true wonder of the world.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Burj Dubai, Business, Comment, Culture, Dubai, Dubai World, Global economy, Global recession, Le Corbusier, Qatar, The Guardian, World news

Dubai's fantasy skyline seems to have been built on sand
• Datablog: Dubai's financial crisis - how much money do banks lend around the world?

I am phenomenally stupid. Stupid in every conceivable way except one: I'm dimly aware that I'm stupid. This means I spend much of my time assuming the rest of the world knows better, that everyone else effortlessly comprehends things I struggle to understand. Things like long division, or which mobile phone tariff to go for. In many ways, this is a comforting thought, as it means there's a limitless pool of people more intelligent than myself I can call on for advice.

But sometimes I find out my gut assumption was right all along, and it's a deeply unsettling experience. Take Dubai. I'm no expert on Dubai. Never been there, and only read about it in passing. The one thing I knew was that everything I heard about it sounded impossible. It was a modern dreamland. A concrete hallucination. A sarcastic version of Las Vegas. Dubai's skyline was dotted with gigantic whimsical behemoths. There were six-star hotels shaped like sails or shoes or starfish. Skyscrapers so tall the moon had to steer its way around them. It had immense off-shore developments: man-made archipelagos that resembled levels from Super Mario Sunshine. One was in the shape of a spreading palm tree. Another consisted of artificial islands representing every country in the world in miniature. As if that wasn't enough, a proposed future development called The Universe would depict the entire solar system.

When I first read about all this stuff, I felt a bit uneasy. None of it sounded real or even vaguely sustainable. I'd been to Las Vegas a few times and seen crazy developments come and go. The first time I visited, the hot new attractions were the Luxor, an immense onyx pyramid, and Treasure Island, a pirate fantasy world replete with lifesize galleons bobbing outside it. Roughly halfway between the pair of them, a replica New York was under construction. By my next visit, the novelty value of both the Luxor and Treasure Island had long since palled, and they now seemed less exotic than Chessington World of Adventures. Meanwhile, unreal New York had been joined by unreal Paris and unreal Venice.

But even at their most huge and demented, none of these insane monuments looked as huge and demented as the projects being announced in Dubai. Yet the novelties, while larger, were wearing thin even more quickly. Dubai's The World archipelago hadn't even opened when the same developers announced The Universe, thereby making The World sound like a rather diminished prototype before anyone had moved in.

In Las Vegas the grimy engine that paid for each new chunk of mega-casino was there in plain sight at street level: woozy drunks thumbing coins into slots 24 hours a day. Hundreds of thousands of them, slumped semi-conscious in rows like dozing cattle hooked up to milking machines. Ching ching ching, slurp slurp slurp. It was like watching a gigantic crystal spider increasing in size as it coldly sapped the husks of its victims. Ugly, but at least it made sense.

Where were the coin slots in Dubai? I had no idea. I just gawped at the photographs and was secretly impressed by the cleverness of the people who'd managed to generate so much money they could safely take leave of their senses and construct 300ft buttplug skyscrapers and artificial floating cities shaped like doodles scribbled in the margins of sanity. To my dumb, uncomprehending eyes it looked like a collection of impossible follies. But what did I know? Clearly the people actually paying for all this stuff knew precisely what they were doing.

But ah and oh. It appears my uninformed gut reaction, that slightly worried vertigo shiver, the hazy sense of "but surely they can't do that . . ." may have been precisely the correct response. Now it's in trouble, the world's financial markets seem shocked and surprised, like Bagpuss being disappointed to learn that the mice from the mouse organ couldn't really create an endless supply of chocolate biscuits from thin air. They should've phoned me for advice. If only I'd known. I could have charged a fortune. But then I'm so dumb I'd probably have blown it investing in an artificial Dubai archipelago shaped like Snoopy's head or something.

In the cold light of 2009, Dubai resembles a mystical Oz that was somehow accidentally wished into existence during an insane decade-long drugs bender. Those psychedelic structures, pictured in a fever by the mad and privileged, physically constructed by the poor and exploited, now look downright embarrassing, like a Facebook photo of a drunken mistake, as though someone somewhere is going to wake up and groan, "Oh my head . . . what did I do last night? Huh? I bankrolled a $200bn hotel in the shape of a croissant? I shipped the workers in from India and paid them how little? Oh man! The shame. What was I thinking?"

The world's tallest skyscraper, the Burj Dubai, is due to open in January. It looks like an almighty shard of misplaced enthusiasm: a lofty syringe injecting dementia directly into the skies, a short-lived spike on a printed readout, or a pin pricking a gigantic bubble. Not a shape you'd want to find yourself unexpectedly sitting on, in other words. Just ask the world's financial markets, once they've finished screaming.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Business, Comment, Culture, Dubai, Dubai World, Middle East, The Guardian

• Institute urges ministers to 'unblock' funding
• Building workers' union seeks social housing boost

• Professions worst hit by the recession (pdf)

Architects are joining the ranks of benefit claimants at a faster rate than any other profession, according to a Guardian analysis of figures for the last 12 months.

Other jobs related to the construction industry, including managers, surveyors, engineers, bricklayers, carpenters and scaffolders, also feature prominently among the 20 professions that have seen the biggest increases in benefits claimants.

Construction unions and professional bodies said the actual numbers out of work were much higher than the official figures suggest and reiterated their pleas for the government to revive the industry by underwriting public building projects.

Office of National Statistics figures released this week show that between February 2008 and February 2009 the number of architects claiming benefits rose by 760% from 150 to 1,290 - the biggest increase among recorded professions.

The second biggest increase was among architectural technologists and town planning technicians.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) said the figures came as no surprise and estimated that the level of unemployment and under-employment among its members was at least 30% higher than official figures.

Riba's president, Sunand Prasad, said the problem was "gigantic". He added: "I would estimate that those figures represent a fraction of the reality, based on our returns, anecdotal material and our projections. And the reason is simple: construction always gets hit in the neck in a recession. It's one of the first casualties of a decline in the economy."

He predicted levels of unemployment in the industry would get worse: "Architects are a bellwether for what's going to happen to the construction industry - buildings that are not being designed today are not going to be built tomorrow."

Prasad said that in spite of the government's commitment to public projects, work had stalled because of a reliance on private finance. Riba had urged the government to "unblock the pipeline" by funding the building of schools, clinics and other public buildings directly from the exchequer for a period of three years, he said.

Riba is also pressing for a project to make social housing more energy efficient as an eco-friendly means of creating jobs. Prasad added: "The biggest danger is that we lose people that don't come back and we are unprepared when the recovery does happen. In the early 90s we lost a whole generation who went on to do other things and that's noticeable in the profession now."

The construction union Ucatt said the numbers out of work might be double the ONS figures because about half of its members were self-employed and did not qualify for some benefits.

The union wants the government to back a huge social housing building project to help create jobs in housing - the worst hit sector of the building industry - and to help the 1 million people living in inadequate accommodation.

"If the money spent on propping up the banks had been spent on social housing then the economy would be in a much healthier state," said Alan Ritchie, Ucatt's general secretary.

Paul Kenny, the GMB general secretary, said: "Large parts of the construction industry is on its knees.

"The GMB has asked the government to acquire unsold blocks of flats and turn them into social housing but that programme is stuck. The government needs to look again at getting it working."

The legal profession has also been badly hit. Lawyers came ninth among the professions with the biggest increases in benefits claimants - up from 350 to 1,570 over the last 12 months - an increase of 349%. Legal secretaries came 12th.

The Law Society said it had set out a detailed agenda to help solicitors survive the recession, including practical guidance for members facing redundancy, a pastoral care helpline and online seminars on "surviving the downturn".

The society's president, Paul Marsh, has also written to Revenue and Customs asking it to suspend its system of taxing law firms before they have received payment for their services.

• This footnote was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday 25 March 2009. Above we quoted the Royal Institute of British Architects as estimating that unemployment and underemployment among its members was at least 30% higher than official figures. In fact, Riba's president, Sunand Prasad, said that in his estimation 30% of architects were currently unemployed or underemployed.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Business, Construction industry, Culture, Housing, Money, News, Recession, Redundancy, Society, The Guardian, UK news, Unemployment and employment statistics, Work & careers

• Tumbling real estate prices hit prestige projects
• Barcelona's glory fades as city of pioneering designs

Spain's long-running love affair with cutting-edge architecture has come to a dramatic end as high-profile projects from the world's greatest architects fall foul of recession and a countrywide building bust.

Last week builders walked away from one of the country's most glamorous architect-driven developments, the Richard Rogers transformation of Barcelona's Las Arenas bullring. With bills unpaid and developers unsure what to do with the 19th century bullring, Lord Rogers' project turning it into a leisure and shopping centre faces an uncertain future.

The half-built shell of Las Arenas now serves as a symbol of Spain's fall from the pedestal of international architectural glory. In Barcelona, the city that kickstarted Spain's embrace of big name architecture two decades ago, a growing number of projects are grinding to a halt. Norman Foster's colourful, ¤250m (£230m) remodelling of Europe's biggest football stadium, the Camp Nou of Barcelona football club, is among those delayed indefinitely.

Work by Frank Gehry on an audacious 34-story office block and a development of 10 tower blocks by Jean Nouvel have also been put off as the city struggles with a construction crash and tumbling real estate prices.

"There is neither the financing nor the confidence to go on,'' said the local La Vanguardia newspaper as it mourned the future loss of Barcelona's reputation as a contemporary architecture showcase.

"There are other priorities,'' said Barcelona mayor Jordi Herreu when asked why some projects were not going ahead.

The slowdown is not confined to Barcelona. London-based architect Alejandro Zaera Polo recently walked away from a building at Madrid's new Campus of Justice – which is also set to boast buildings by Rogers, Foster and Zaha Hadid – complaining the budget was too low.

In Valencia, a new stadium for the city's football club also stands half-built as the owners admit they have no way of paying for it to be finished.

The collapse of such high-profile projects follows two decades of frenetic building that turned Spain into a playground for the world's star architects.

Financing for many schemes, however, depended on land sales or the construction of office blocks and residential buildings that would help fund them.

A Spanish housing bubble burst last year, bringing construction to a grinding halt. Up to 2m recently finished homes have yet to be sold and the value of building land has been wiped out in some places.

Some estimates suggest the excess stock of newly-built homes will not be sold off until 2012. House prices are predicted to fall by up to 30%.

With Spanish developers queueing up to file for bankruptcy, few can now afford big-name architects. Metrovacesa, which owns the Las Arenas site, was recently taken over by a group of banks after it failed to pay debts and is sacking its staff.

Barcelona led a fashion among Spanish cities for turning to the great names of contemporary architecture to transform urban centres with huge ‑ and often costly ‑ emblematic buildings.

Its buildings for the 1992 Olympic Games set the trend, bringing in architects like Foster, Gehry and Arata Isozaki.

Gehry's transformation of the northern city of Bilbao through a single building, the titanium-clad Guggenheim museum, marked the spread of the Barcelona model to the rest of Spain.

Cities of all sizes vied to bring in the big name. Many winners of the prestigious Pritzker prize ‑ dubbed the architects' Nobel ‑ found themselves busy on Spanish projects.

Madrid's Campus of Justice, with its collection of designs by Pritzker-winning architects, is another project that is slowing down.

"The campus is no longer a top priority and resources must go elsewhere," admitted Alfons Cuenca, deputy head of the Madrid regional government's justice department. "That does not mean it isn't going ahead, but that the work will slow down.''

Architects admit the writing is on the wall but hope Spain will recover a taste for signature buildings when the recession ends.

"You cannot pick up a newspaper without reading about the financial crisis,'' said a source close to Gehry's practice, commenting on his Barcelona office block. "We've waited many years to do this project, and we will keep waiting."

"We are unable to comment on how the Las Arenas project will proceed following the recent change of ownership,'' said Lennart Grut, a senior director at Rogers' architectural partnership. "However, we continue to maintain our site presence.''

Meanwhile the fenced-off shell of Las Arenas will provide a depressing reminder to visitors that the boom days of Spanish architecture are over.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Business, Culture, Global economy, Global recession, News, Spain, The Guardian, World news

Famous US architect's firm, Gehry Partners, has lost half its staff over the past year

His splashy buildings, with their soaring wings and titanium-clad sides, seem like symbols for other, more prosperous times. Now Frank Gehry, one of the world's leading architects, is facing up to the economic realities of the present day.

The staff at Gehry Partners, which boasts offices in Paris, Hong Kong and New York as well as its headquarters in Los Angeles, has been cut in half over the past year.

Two major projects, in Grand Avenue, Los Angeles and Brooklyn, New York, that Gehry had hoped would define his legacy, have been put on hold as the economy spirals downwards.

And Gehry's longstanding plans to build a new home for himself in Venice, California, have also hit a standstill.

For the man who gave rise to the term "starchitect", the wow factor seems to be lacking.

"I've had a disappointing year, couple of years, with Grand Avenue and Brooklyn," Gehry told the Los Angeles Times last week, shortly before his 80th birthday. "All my life I've wanted to do projects like that, and they never came to me. And then all of a sudden I had two of them. I invested the last five years in them, and they're both stopped. So it leaves a very hollow feeling in your bones."

The Grand Avenue project is part of an ambitious $3bn plan to, in the words of the developers, turn part of downtown LA into the Champs Elysees of the western US. The multi-use development, a public-private partnership, was to have been built close to Gehry's signature LA design, the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

But the architect's initial plans for a 600-foot, 50-floor, glass-encased tower flanked by two smaller towers have been downsized. The project was initially scheduled for completion this year, but that was subsequently moved to 2011. That target now appears unlikely, as work on the scheme has yet to begin.

Similarly, the Atlantic Yard development in Brooklyn, which was originally planned to have 16 towers, is also on hold.

The only bright point for Gehry is in Abu Dhabi, where he is repeating the collaboration that led to one of his most celebrated buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a $200m, 30,000-square-metre contemporary art museum will form the centrepiece of the Saadiyat Island cultural district.

"I was reluctant at first to do it," Gehry said. "I thought, 'I don't want to go there now. It's too far, it's a new culture, I'm too old to get into it.' And [Guggenheim director Thomas] Krens prevailed and got me to go. And you know, if I hadn't taken that job, the office would be a lot smaller today. It may very well help me get through this downturn."

The Abu Dhabi project reflects many of the grandiose gestures that have led critics to suggest that the age of the celebrity architect, intent on realising designs that serve more as tourist attractions than functioning buildings, is over. In typical Gehry style, the design resembles a clutter of boxes and curves dropped in the sand next to a lake.

Gehry's design will stand alongside buildings by a near who's who of the world's best-known architects: Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and Tadao Ando.

"The landscape, the opportunity, the requirement, to build something that people all over the world would come to and the possible resource to accomplish it opened tracks that were not likely to be considered anywhere else," Gehry said two years ago.

But while the flamboyant and extravagant is still feasible in Abu Dhabi, closer to home, Gehry is eyeing a return to his more modest roots.

"Today, if there's frugality, I'm ready," said the Canadian-born architect who came to notice when he wrapped his own home in Santa Monica, California in chain link and corrugated steel.

"I'll do corrugated again. It's fun to work that way, and it's easy. Why spend all the money for fancy details and stuff? You don't need it. You can get the passion with simpler things."

Accordingly, the forlorn plot of land he bought in Venice for his new home will now be downsized: instead of one compound for him and his wife Berta, he will split it into three, building homes for his son and two employees.

"I think I'm stuck here, on 22nd Street in Santa Monica," he said.

Feeling the pinch

Richard Rogers's cheese grater-shaped Leadenhall tower in the City of London has been put on hold, a move which in part led to Rogers's decision to lay off 35 staff. At least nine skyscrapers in Dubai have been put on hold, while in the US, a spire-shaped tower by Santiago Calatrave has been put on ice. In the UK Hammerson, a property developer which specialised in shopping centres has postponed construction work on all its proposed projects.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Business, Culture, guardian.co.uk, News, United States, US economy, World news