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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A rose-red vision in the Rockies

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

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

The infamous Louvre pyramid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the new-look US embassy is a lump

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

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

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

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

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

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Jonathan Glancey on the new US embassy for London

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Andy Hall's 360-degree image takes you right inside SANAA's spectacular new campus building at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, with commentary by Observer architecture critic Rowan Moore

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Our new critic admires the Japanese precision and flow of a spectacular, otherwordly campus building in Switzerland

I am mesmerised. As far as I can see, in every direction, there are undulations, clad in grey carpet, glass, white metal, fragmentary views of a nondescript beyond. Everything is flow, without doors or steps, and other people appear as silhouettes on the many internal horizons that the building creates. It is like some filmic vision of the afterlife, possibly 1960s vintage. Except that here the eternal is calibrated by frequent, identical, impeccably precise Rolex clocks.

You can see the undulations as hills, perhaps a reference to the nearby Alps, and a representative of the architects describes the composition as "musical". So the hills are alive, I think irreverently and irrelevantly, with the sound of music.

At which point Kazuyo Sejima descends a slope. She is slight and poised, dressed with playful elegance in a ruched black skirt, and is not really much like Julie Andrews.

Sejima is one half of Sanaa, a Japanese practice that is the latest recruit to the pantheon of Rems, Zahas, Gehrys and Herzogs, that is to say the band of architects who by some global critical consensus are considered the best in the world, and who are invited to compete against each other for the design of museums, concert halls and other cultural buildings in three or four continents. The mesmerising building is the £65m Rolex Learning Centre in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). It is their biggest and most spectacular work to date.

It can only be a matter of time before the Pritzker prize, the architectural Nobel worth $100,000 (£64,000) to the winner, is sent Sanaa's way. Last year they designed the Serpentine Gallery's annual pavilion. This year Sejima has been invited to direct the Venice Architecture Biennale, whose president has described her, in terms that employ a curious sense of gender, as "one of the new masters of the new millennium".

The interesting thing about the 54-year-old Sejima and her more pugnacious partner, Ryue Nishizawa, who is a decade younger, is that they are elusive. They have no manifesto or house style or signature: yes, they mostly use white metal, concrete and glass, but so do many other architects. They work ferociously hard: I have visited their Tokyo office at 9pm on a Saturday and seen their grey-faced staff gearing up for many hours' work ahead. People use words about them such as "strong" and "brave", and for Sejima to succeed in the masculine world of Japanese architecture she could be little else. But this work and courage is in the service of something undefined.

They are most comfortable when talking about their work. The Rolex Learning Centre is a new heart for a campus of 7,000 students and 4,000 research and academic staff, and includes a library, offices, bookshop, cafe, restaurant, laboratories, a 600-seat auditorium and a branch of Credit Suisse bank. Sanaa's big idea is to make it into "one huge big room", a 10,000 square metre territory where corridors are abolished and enclosures minimal.

"The main aim is to make a space for people to stay together," says Sejima, "but where you can also have some privacy." The design reflects their idea of "softening boundaries". She opposes "programmes that say a room is a place to learn and a corridor is a place to relax. I do not think that is a way to learn. Sometimes, activities become continuous. You might have a coffee outside the classroom and change your opinion."

The role of architecture is to suggest ways to use the space, rather than to prescribe. Nishizawa pushes the analogy with landscape: "When people find valleys, they tend to settle there and build villages. When they find a hill, they like to build a beautiful cafe on the hill. When they find slopes, they cover them in terraces." In the same way, they think their artificial hills will prompt different kinds of occupation: "We hope students can find nice places for themselves."

What they have come up with in Lausanne is the work of an age of smoothness and flow. It is a place without the darkness of old libraries, a place where abundant knowledge can be accessed without friction or fear. If you could live inside an iPad it would look something like this. It is a playground, a hippie utopia adapted for future masters of a technological universe – for the college it serves trains people to make ever more brilliant software, or watches, or medical procedures, in the future. This is why the centre's sponsor, Rolex, is interested in imprinting its brand. It means that it can acquire the best students for itself.

The building is also an alternative reality in an area of the world that specialises in such things. Underground, not far away, Cern's Large Hadron Collider is applying colossal power to the pursuit of the esoteric. The International Olympic Committee, with its idealised view of world harmony, is based in Lausanne. The Blue Brain Project, which is constructing a computer simulation of the mammalian brain, is being run by the EPFL's Brain and Mind Institute. Inside the learning centre you feel as if familiar things – hills, valleys, sky, inside, outside, natural, artificial – have been rearranged in a strange and wondrous way.

It verges on the spooky and there are also times when more mundane reality impinges in awkward ways. Sanaa and local authorities didn't see eye to eye on the best ways to achieve disabled access, with the result that some awkward ramps intrude on the flow, along with raised strips to help blind people find fire exits. Prosaic facts of construction, like curves that are a bit lumpy, get in the way.

But it is still an astonishing place. It is also a place which, for all its otherworldliness, reinstates your sense of yourself. The slopes, like real hills, require you to exercise your body. The point of the building is the importance of physical rather than virtual proximity. When pressed, Sanaa eventually come up with the elusive thing for which they fight so hard: "Our focus is always to find different relationships." It sounds flat and yet its realisation in the learning centre is anything but.

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