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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

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

In chasing its short-term targets for new housing, Labour is storing up a legacy of unfit homes

Channel 4, being on the cutting edge of all that's "real", has a predilection for making people live in surroundings not of their own choosing for the purpose of viewers' entertainment. It has just sent four MPs to live on council estates around Britain, with the results being broadcast, starting this week, ­under the boom-tish title Tower Block of Commons.

All that's needed to bring a nation's schadenfreude to a rolling boil is the footage of hapless Lib Dem Mark Oaten groaning, as he approaches his billet: "I'm hoping I'm not in a tower block. It is a bloody tower block." He goes on to describe his feelings about where he's spending a week in terms more suited to banishment during the cultural revolution. Fair enough, perhaps, given the project is intended in part as media ­rehabilitation for legislators.

The level of public esteem accorded to both tower blocks and politicians is, for the moment, about equal. They fester alongside charity muggers and Ryanair in what David Bowie, in the 1986 film Labyrinth, termed "the bog of eternal stench". So what would you say if you knew that the next generation of soon-to-be-loathed and unfit-for-purpose housing was being thrown up under the government's watch?

The Kickstart "housing delivery" programme, through which £400m of public money will be administered to stalled and truncated new housebuilding schemes by the Homes & Communities Agency, has been given a kicking in recent weeks by parties including the influential Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the government's adviser on building quality.

Under the first round of the programme, many schemes have been revealed as failing most of Cabe's Building for Life criteria. New developments are given ratings out of 20 according to the quality of design, surroundings, environmental credentials and ­likelihood of creating a sense of community. Some have scored as little as 1.5, with many others ­achieving 10 or less.

In effect, the government is pushing through inadequate housing schemes in order to meet its target of ­having built 3m new homes before 2020. Disenchanted professionals have taken to calling the programme ­"Building Slums for the Future" in a nod to the government's other patchy mass construction scheme, Building Schools for the Future.

Yet they're not getting the support they hoped for among other design champions. Even David Birkbeck, the chief executive of Design for Homes, an independent body, has called Kickstart "a Marshall Plan for the devastated housebuilding sector. You don't just give emergency aid to the best dressed. The HCA is right to withhold support from only the very worst".

Really? There's already plenty of appallingly unattractive and family-unfriendly new housing that's been completed during the recession without the aid of Kickstart. My favourite of these must be a high-rise orange space crumpet named The Old Bus Depot, squashed into the junction of two busy A-roads near the M6 at Lancaster. Solely comprising one- and two-bedroom flats, its balconies enjoy uninterrupted views of a PC World superstore and the bit where the A683 splits off from the A6.

Where's the commitment to usefulness, to durability and to delight, which design thinkers from Vitruvius onwards have advocated? John Healey is the latest in a long line of short-lived housing ministers for whom design and planning is just part of a new brief that has to be mastered, rather than a cause that needs pushing and defending at every turn.

Does he, like Richard Crossman in the last mass housing boom of the mid-1960s, want to push through acres of new housing that will look good for the books in the short term but fail miserably in terms of sustainability, and the ­wellbeing of residents? Or does he want to have a legacy so lasting that people remember your name and associate it – like Nye Bevan's – with the use of political power for democratising, rather than expedient, ends? We have long been used to talking about the health service in these kinds of epic terms. Now it's time for housing and planning to be treated with the same fundamental seriousness.

Good homes for all. That's all anyone needs to have in mind. Never mind making it "affordable" – we're the fourth richest country in the world, we can afford to build it, and subsidise it if need be. We could afford good housing in 1945; to say we can't now is like saying we can't afford to think of a future that isn't going to happen. It is. It just depends on what you want it to look like.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Comment, Design, Housing, Politics, Public services policy, Society, The Guardian

An engineering firm reckons that rebuilding the palace could make Her Majesty much greener. But why stop there?

A nefarious plot to destroy Buckingham Palace has been exposed, but it's not the work of terrorists, anarchists or extremist property developers. No, this one comes from an engineering consultancy. Before the capital goes on high alert, Atkins, a design and engineering group, weren't actually intending to carry out this plan. In a none-too-serious assessment of the building's green credentials, rather, they dropped the hint – or was it a gauntlet? – that the Queen might be better off with a new London eco-crib.

Atkins's proposal was part of a fanciful survey by Construction Manager magazine into how much it might cost to rebuild British landmarks. It concluded that you could build a new energy-efficient replica of the palace for a knock-down £320m (Stonehenge would be £815m, but it's hard to see how you could make a collection of stones any greener). Among other improvements, the report suggested replacing the palace's 760 sash windows with double-glazed replicas, and installing photovoltaic panels, ground-source heat pumps and masses of insulation. With such changes, the royal carbon footprint would be 400 tonnes of CO² lighter every year, it estimates, and the palace's £2.2m utilities bill would be slashed by 90%.

According to a bemused Palace spokesperson, there are currently no plans to raze the Queen's London home –it is a Grade I listed building (is the Queen allowed to destroy those?). The spokesperson also pointed out that the Royal family's green credentials were actually pretty decent already, thank you. In a recent (proper) energy audit, Buckingham Palace was rated a "C" (A being the highest and G the lowest) – very good for a hulking 18th-century pile. It's had a CHP (combined heat and power) unit since 1995, it uses water from a bore hole in the garden to cool the wine cellars and for some of the air conditioning, and some of the skylights are actually double-glazed. Although, that's nothing compared to Balmoral, which is powered by its own hydroelectric plant.

But more interesting than assessing the greenness of the Queen is the prospect of a new Buckingham Palace. A replica would be 10 times more expensive than the original, says Atkins, since the craftsmen and artisans required for the job are now highly-paid specialists, rather than jobbing joiners and plasterers. And that's using a concrete and steel frame and off-the-shelf materials, rather than proper stone. But why build a replica? Despite the palace's history, it's not really much of a building, architecturally, is it? Originally the home of the Duke of Buckingham, it was bought by George III in 1761. Since then, a number of architects have tried to improve it, including John Nash, Edward Blore and finally, Aston Webb, who gave it the neoclassical makeover we all know. Nikolaus Pevsner accurately described it as "a large and rather stiff country house" – surely not the right image for a forward-looking monarchy. Why not do something a bit more urban and up-to-date instead?

The obvious problem with building any state-of-the-art eco-palace, though, is the heir apparent. Given Prince Charles's views on architecture, he probably would rather build an exact replica than anything else. On the other hand, we could give it to Richard Rogers as payback for the Chelsea Barracks scheme, which was so roundly scuppered by the Prince's intervention last year. Or put it out to competition. Just think what a decent architect could do with £320m and a prime 40-acre site. But who could or should design such a residence? To the wrecking ball, citizens!

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Culture, Design, Environment, Green building, guardian.co.uk, Heritage, The Queen

Kapoor's proposal for a tower on the Olympic games site is the ultimate luxury – architecture unencumbered by day-to-day functionality

It looks as if Anish Kapoor will be let loose on the site of the London 2012 Olympics at Stratford, east London, to design a gargantuan tower sponsored by steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal. Like the altogether more modest Skylon – an ethereal, skypiercing mast on the South Bank designed by the architects Powell and Moya as a signpost for the 1951 Festival of Britain – Kapoor's tower, designed in collaboration with the imaginative structural engineer Cecil Balmond, will draw attention to the Olympics Park more persuasively than any of the architecture commissioned for the event. Only Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre will be able to hold anything like a flaming torch to this structure.

But it does raise questions. First, when is a sculpture more of a building than an artwork? And thus, when does an artist become an architect – at least in spirit, if not in law (after all, you can't call yourself an architect unless you have qualified as one)? And a third question, too: can artists take on architects at their own game?

Long before the architectural profession was officially recognised, architects, artists, craftsmen and builders worked more or less freely across their shared discipline. The greatest of them – Michelangelo vaults to mind like some Olympian high-jumper – produced some of the finest paintings, sculptures and architecture of all time. Even by the end of the 19th Century and the early 20th, when the architectural profession was well-established, the most imaginative architects of the era were equally inspiring, whether drawing, building, painting or decorating. In Barcelona, the likes of Antoni Gaudí or Domènech i Montaner were surely artists as well as builders, as were Otto Wagner in Vienna or Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow. The watercolours Mackintosh painted in his last years in the south of France, after he had given up architecture, are quite superb.

What separates the role of the artist and architect today is the fact that artists may be asked to design enormous structures requiring collaboration with engineers, yet they're nearly always gloriously useless. Buildings have to function in matter-of-fact ways. Most need plumbing, heating, lavatories – all those down-to-earth elements that Kapoor will not have to get his head around for his soaring tower at Stratford. I'm not saying an artist can't design a fully functioning building, any more than I am claiming that some contemporary architects aren't great sculptors – Frank Gehry and his Bilbao Guggenheim come to mind. If you ever get the chance, do visit Diego Rivera's House of Anáhuac in Coyoacan, Mexico City. Designed by the artist himself, this haunting 1950s structure, inspired by Mayan and Aztec architecture, houses the artist's inspiring collection of pre-Hispanic Art.

Such buildings, though, are rare. The artist brings something else to a project: unbottled imagination. Kapoor's own Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park – 110 tonnes of mirror-polished stainless steel – plays with infinite distorted views of the surrounding cityscape, especially its forest of skyscrapers. Here, an artist with a real love of buildings brings the two disciplines – art and architecture – into, and out of, focus.

In some ways, Cloud Gate is an ­appealing model. There is a world of difference between a fully functioning building and an artwork designed and built on an architectural scale, but the play between the two offers any number of intriguing possibilities. Kapoor should seize this Olympian opportunity, and run like crazy.

The Sheet Architecture News Anish Kapoor, Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Lakshmi Mittal, Olympic games 2012, Zaha Hadid

The world's tallest building may be a triumph of beauty and ambition, but the soulless cityscape surrounding it is another matter

We're going to need a new word. The Burj Dubai doesn't scrape the sky; it pierces it like a slender silver needle, half a mile high. It's only because Dubai never has any clouds that we can even see the tower's top. And, judging by the images released so far, the view is more like looking out of a plane than a building. It has made reality a little less real.

The facts and figures about the tower are equally surreal – like the one about how it could be eight degrees cooler at the top than at the bottom, or the one about how you could watch the sunset at the bottom, then take a lift up to the top and watch it all over again. It's a new order of tallness, even compared with its nearest rival, Taiwan's Taipei 101, which it exceeds by more than 300 metres.

But, beyond height, is there anything to celebrate here? From our current perspective, the Burj Dubai symbolises catastrophic excess – of money, confidence, ambition, energy consumption. And the fact that it will most likely stand empty for years to come has been noted with great satisfaction here in the west. But isn't this how we've responded to every tall structure of note, from Babel onwards? And even its many critics have to admit the tower is a rather stunning piece of architecture. Chiefly designed by Adrian Smith, formerly of skyscraper specialists SOM, and engineer Bill Baker, it is beautifully sleek and elegant, rising in a graceful series of silver tubes of different heights. It looks less like a single tower than a cluster of towers, an organic formation rather than a self-consciously iconic object. This is surely the best-looking tall building since New York's Chrysler and the Empire State buildings in the 1930s.

In environmental terms, the Burj Dubai is way too tall to justify itself, but there is at least some structural efficiency to the form. Its Y-shaped plan – three wings extending from a central core, like the roots of a tree – "confuses the wind", in the architects' words, while the core stops the wings from twisting (which would give top-floor occupants nausea). For super-tall buildings – and surely there will be more, one day – this "buttressed core" design is likely to become the prevailing form.

More worrying than the tower itself, however, is what's around it. In 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled a scheme for an elegantly preposterous mile-high skyscraper for Chicago, safe in the knowledge that he'd never have to figure out how to build it. It was undoubtedly an influence on the Burj Dubai. It even had a similar triangular structure. But Wright's intentions with his mile-high skyscraper were to create a concentrated human habitat, the better to halt Chicago's unstoppable urban sprawl, and free up ground space for parks, nature and leisure.

The Burj Dubai, by contrast, has become the tentpole for several more acres of anonymous, soulless, energy-hungry cityscape. You can apparently see for 60 miles from the top, but when you look down, the immediate landscape is the same schematic real-estate tat you see everywhere else in Dubai: vast shopping malls, bland office towers, sprawling residential developments semi-themed to resemble "traditional" Arabian villages, outsized ornamental fountains. The Burj Dubai might be a triumph vertically, but what about the horizontal?

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art and design, Burj Khalifa, Comment, Culture, Design, Dubai, guardian.co.uk

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

Cambridge University Library, which turned 75 in October last year, is probably the ugliest building in Cambridge, but those of us who regularly use it love it very much. To us, its undeniable ugliness is as irrelevant as the warts on the face of a beloved mother. It may have fewer early-printed books than the British Library, and fewer literary manuscripts than the Bodleian in Oxford, but it is far better run than either. Readers are allowed to search for their books in the stacks, which does not mean that the entire collection is mis-shelved – only that you have a better chance of ending up with the book you're looking for than in either of the other institutions. For those of us who have the right to enjoy it, the library is heaven on earth.

The building was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in the rationalist-fascist style of the mid-1930s. Its most conspicuous feature is a blunt tower, visible for many miles – even from the M11 – making it a far more significant identifier of Cambridge than King's College Chapel (though you won't find the tower on too many tea towels). It stands 12 storeys high; the rest of the original library stands at six. As the tower often has a plume of steam emerging from it, the whole structure has the air of a place where books are burned rather than read. The building is built around two internal courtyards, like prison yards, which cannot be accessed from outside; the entrance facade stands atop an intimidating flight of stairs.

Whatever else you say about the library, you must confess that it is bold. But this boldness is now being vitiated by endless rather ordinary accretions. The least impressive of these was unveiled last September, and consists of 14 bollards that block off the approach to the library steps. Although this seems in part intended as a means of reducing parking space, it is an installation: 1% of the library's budget has to be spent on public art (as outlined in the Per Cent for Art scheme, monitored by Arts Council England).

The bollards are bronze, in the form of columnar piles of books. Imagine the library built like a fortress to safeguard our intellectual inheritance, and outside it piles of apparently rejected books. The idea is not so much shocking as humiliatingly naff. Ten of the columns are fixed, but in four the individual books can be made to rotate. If you line them up right, you get the words "Ex Libris", the name of the sculpture, which according to the artist (a local man, Harry Gray) is "a metaphor for the library itself; you can't just look at the books, you have to use them to gain understanding, to get the bigger picture". Gray appears not to know that Ex Libris is also the name of the best-known purveyors of electronic library resources, now guaranteed free advertising in perpetuity.

The money for the bronze book bollards was provided by the Arcadia Fund, run by the academic and philanthropist Lisbet Rausing and her husband Peter Baldwin. Altogether the fund has provided the library with $980,000 (£612,000), intended "to create new programmes and services, particularly for undergraduates, and also improve the external environment of the ^­ library". But if you are contemplating some bronze bollards of your own, don't approach the fund, which does not consider unsolicited applications. Instead, it invites applications on the suggestion of its advisory board, which includes the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University.

The new librarian, Anne Jarvis, took office in April last year and cannot be blamed for the bollards. Still, she has taken it upon herself to defend them against their critics, saying that it was she who wanted to bring "the library out beyond its walls and create a welcoming space". As anyone who has tried to smoke a cigarette or eat a sandwich in that space could tell you, it is usually in shadow, draughty and cold much of the year. All they had to do to create a welcoming outside space would have been to rip up the tarmac and make a sheltered garden, at a fraction of the price.

Jarvis's next proposal is to sell the library's name to anyone who is vainglorious enough to pay for it. The CUL already includes libraries named for other benefactors; Jarvis now seeks an over-arching donor, who will out-donate all the others. Could the CUL become the Coca Cola Library, or the Barclays Library? Would there be anything members of the university could do to prevent it?

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art, Art and design, Books, Comment, Culture, Education, Heritage, Libraries, The Guardian, University of Cambridge

Trawsfynydd, Snowdonia's Basil Spence-designed energy plant, is a triumph of modernist architecture – we should be celebrating it, not bringing in the bulldozers

Drive along the A470 into the heart of Snowdonia National Park and an unexpected, magnificent sight greets you. Fronting a man-made lake in the foreground, in the shadow of the rugged Moelwyn Mountains, are two giant nuclear reactors.

Not just any nuclear reactors, though. This is the Trawsfynydd nuclear power station, designed by Sir Basil Spence, arguably Britain's most talented modernist architect. It's an uncompromising but dramatic example of postwar architecture. Get a good eyeful while you can: unless an 11th-hour bid to save Trawsfynydd is successful, the bulldozers will roll in next year to partially demolish it.

Most power stations are designed by engineer-architects, and aesthetics come far down the priority list – if at all. But Trawsfynydd is different. Opened in 1968, it was one of the first generations of nuclear stations, conceived in the decade of Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace programme. It is optimistic, triumphant and utterly original: its uncompromising concrete facade towers 55 metres high, with neat rows of windows set around rectangle slabs jutting out of the building. It's crowned with four turret-like sculptural features on the roof. This is a building that unashamedly ignores the human scale. It intimidates and overpowers, a building that wouldn't look out of place on the set of Terry Gilliam's epic 1985 film Brazil. Trawsfynydd takes its cue from the dramatic and foreboding Snowdonia scenery, the towering linear form of the reactors juxtaposing beautifully with the organic and grandiose scenery that surrounds it. Now decommissioned, it's a fitting monument to the pioneering men who split atoms for a new future.

Yet the local community has long harboured anger that Westminster imposed the station on them decades ago. Feelings run deep and when, a year after it was shut down, there was talk of the station reopening, 300 people took to the streets to protest. Because of the radioactivity, the reactors must remain in some form for at least another century. Snowdonia planners want to halve the height of the reactor buildings to "improve" the look of the area. You sense there's a subconscious reason, too – that society is wreaking revenge on Trawsfynydd for nuclear mistakes of the past.

But instead of bastardising Trawsfynydd, we should be celebrating its bold and pioneering design. It's only in recent years that Britain has come to admit – even, grudgingly, to admire – its modernist past. West London's Trellick Tower, designed by Hungarian Brutalist Ernö Goldfinger, has become a byword for what renovation can do, having been transformed from a dilapidated and despised housing estate into a desirable place to live that features in the colour supplements and design magazines. But this change of heart came too late for other modernist masterpieces, notably the Dunlop Semtex factory in Brynmawr, Wales. Completed in 1953, the building – made up of nine geometric domes covering the central production area – was the inspiration for the design of the Sydney Opera House and was praised by Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1991, protestors staged nightly vigils around the building in an attempt to save it from demolition. But it was bulldozed a few weeks later.

I began an online debate about Trawsfynydd a couple of months ago, which stirred up strong feelings and a lively discussion – far richer than some of the poorly-attended public meetings held about the future of the site. Some believe that Trawsfynydd is an eyesore and should be erased from the landscape, among them the Plaid Cymru MP Elfyn Llwyd, who has said that any suggestion of the building being saved is "bonkers". Others have told me that Trawsfynydd has inspired them, including internationally-renowned abstract painter Sonja Benskin Mesher, who this month opened a solo exhibition of paintings of Trawsfynydd.

There is a chance that this masterpiece could be saved. The decision rests with Cadw, Wales's historic buildings authority which has been persuaded to consider listing Trawsfynydd; a site inspection will take place in the new year and a decision is expected in mid-February. When designing it, Spence knew the building would have a limited life as a nuclear power station. He therefore had the foresight to set himself a guiding question for the design, which was inspired by the great English neo-classical architect Sir John Soane: "Will it make a beautiful ruin?" Unless we act now, we'll never know.

The Sheet Architecture News Architecture, Art, Comment, Culture, Design, guardian.co.uk, Wales

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