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A crumbling art deco apartment block designed to resemble the Queen Mary is one of the glories of England's south coast. Iain Sinclair is seduced by its faded charms

Just before 7am on the morning of 20 July 2010, a number of passengers disembark from a beached concrete liner and shuffle through the shallows of St Leonards-on-Sea, to foregather and huddle, as with all nautical disasters, while they wait for the lifeboat. Which arrives in the form of a world-weary charabanc. They are head-counted, eased into tight slots for the bumpy ride down the coast to Newhaven. Where they will clamber aboard the MV Balmoral for a day's voyage to Tower Bridge, by way of Beachy Head.

As they put out into a glassy sea, familiar topographical markers are set aside. A steward, staggering to balance a tray of liquid refreshment and burger refills for the captain, tells an inquirer that Canvey Island is Tilbury. Every time we steer in close enough to inspect a natural wonder – the white cliffs of Dover or the Dungeness nuclear power station – our vessel tilts, alarmingly, as 650 cameras whirr and click. Seen from the shore, it must seem a miracle that we stay afloat. The crowded deck is like an out-take from Otto Preminger's Exodus. Quayside at Newhaven, embarkation feels like evolution going into reverse, primitive life forms rushing back to the ocean. Standing room only, queues for the breakfast bar snaking up the stairs and twice round the deck. The recklessly abandoned St Leonards boat-building, on the other hand, its design based on the Queen Mary, has plenty of room for a decayed first class of freeholders, with an ever-shifting ballast of rentals in steerage, tucked away in the old servants' quarters at the rear.

Marine Court looks big enough to rehouse Hackney. Superstructure burdened with a forest of radio masts and photovoltaic scanners, this prewar monster looms over the remnants of James Burton's 1820s colonnades, at a slight angle, like a stack of dirty plates from a wedding breakfast in the Royal Victoria hotel. You can picture the unstable reef tilting in the wind, which surges around shops embedded in its hull with enough force to repel retirees at the window of the showroom where they stock an infinite variety of furniture to die in. Marine Court, which should never have been given a berth, stealing light from steep hillside terraces, has the dignity of an old circus elephant. With the passage of time, it has become a geological feature. And one of the glories of the south coast.

The only other such building in the world, a luxury hotel based on the Queen Mary's competitor in the blue-ribbon Atlantic trade, the SS Normandie, is to be found in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Fringed by trees, proud against a permanently blue sky, the sleek curves of the hotel and the dazzling whiteness of its balconies demonstrate everything Marine Court is not; but what, with care (and serious investment), it could become. The Normandie hotel, in streamline moderne style, was conceived by the engineer Félix Benítez as a loving tribute to his French wife, Moineau, whom he met, in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers fashion, on an ocean voyage. The rival concrete liners were launched at the same moment, 1938. The Normandie hotel accrued the glamour of a Cuban resort for high-rollers out of The Godfather, while Marine Court, undone by war, boarded by pirates, declined into a set for The Shining. A haunted hangar in which to house a crazed writer, hammering out the same sentence, over and over, while he waits to join the undead in a decommissioned cocktail bar.

A good scattering of Marine Courters were aboard the Balmoral that morning. I had never seen so many in one place. On winter stays in the building, I encountered no other human presence: antique grille-fronted lifts groaned, furred pipes complained. Hot water resisted every inch of the way to chromium-plated bathrooms. Endless corridors, viewed through diamond-shaped portholes, were low-lit and unpeopled – at least by anything you could see or touch. Monitor screens in the mirrored lobby, with its chequerboard floor, played back drifts of aquarium light. Panels were as blank as if wiped by a vampire. An occasional porter, left over from another era, creaked through, with a nod and a tug at the cuffs of a threadbare uniform.

I was frozen in my tracks by the approach of a figure in black T-shirt and baggy tracksuit bottoms, up there on the monitor screen: a memory-spectre, from an erased chapter of my life, come back from the aether. I hadn't set eyes on Ranald Graham since our student days in Dublin, 40 years before. His flat, at the top of the building, was insulated in unshelved countercultural paperbacks and olive-green copies of Paris-published Burroughs. Along with mounds of plays and film scripts, made and unmade. There had been an afterlife, so he explained, of television production, The Sweeney, Dempsey and Makepeace, strategically funded programmers in Hong Kong. There were adventures in Hollywood too, including the screenplay for William Castle's last film, Shanks, made in 1974 and generally acknowledged as the weirdest project ever to emerge from a major studio. The white-face mime Marcel Marceau plays a dual role, as a scientist trying to reanimate dead animals and a puppeteer assisting with the experiments. The puppeteer releases zombies to jerk and twitch on missions of vengeance. After that, there was nowhere to go. Except Marine Court. The ship of fools where lost souls are always welcome.

Ranald was gregarious, a lovely teller of tales. He took an active part in the gambling school, predicting football scores, at £2 a hit, in the minimart on the corner. And he nursed the ambition to complete the ultimate horror script, the one he had been cooking for so many years. He was hammering at his laptop when he heard a rap at the window. A figure, naked to the waist, punctured by needles like a refugee from Hellraiser, stared in at him. And beckoned. He roared, he rushed. The barefoot man lurched away into the darkness. He was the living proof of my conviction that this building incubates narrative. Stories tell us, not us them, while we listen to the drag of pebbles on the tide, and become absorbed in the great fact of the English Channel. But there was a rational explanation for the spook at his window. A poor creature, suffering and medicated, in another flat on another floor, had become disorientated, and was roaming the balconies trying to find a safe door.

The accidental fraternity of Marine Court, gathering on the deck of the Balmoral, like Aleister Crowley's coven up on the ridge in Hastings, were drawn together. We were there for a reason. We had the powerful atavistic urge to view our concrete liner from the sea, to achieve a reverse angle that would confer on the peeling leviathan the gravitas it deserved. Distance, in this case, was time. From seven miles out, as we stared at the hazy coastline from alongside the Royal Sovereign lighthouse, Marine Court shone with the brilliance of its launch as a modernist fantasy, a pleasure palace conceived in the spirit of Agatha Christie. With art deco restaurants, tea rooms, Turkish baths and "fittings worthy of a West End mansion".

Kevin, who rented a flat in the building and who loved everything about it, introduced himself. He carried digital equipment with which to assemble, as he confessed, a feature-length account of our voyage. His camera privileged Marine Court in a way denied to the human eye. It became what it had ceased to be in the real world, a paradigm of south-coast regeneration; a 600ft, 13-storey wonder. Kevin explained that he tended to stay indoors, on his balcony, after work. He was a big man and too many of the street folk of London Road knew him from his day job as a security guard at Morrisons. One enterprising local had been captured with 12 bottles of Baileys secreted inside his overcoat.

Experiencing a temporary estrangement from Hackney, I walked around the coast, in the opposite direction to the Balmoral, to search for a place that would fire my imagination. After Whitstable, Margate, Deal, Dover, Pevensey Bay, Eastbourne and Brighton, I gave it up. Until the photographer Effie Paleologou invited me down to Hastings for a talk she was giving about a commission, to depict the town at night. Like Ranald Graham, she stumbled into a landscape of astonishing eccentrics, whispering voices hungry for the right ventriloquist. The beauty of the thing was that she absorbed all this, without patronage or exploitation, and produced a series of exquisitely graded minimalist prints, with not a breath of human interference. A leakage of sour neon against dying natural light. She led our group on a walk through the flower-dressed alleys of the Old Town. Characterful houses were still to be had at modest prices. This quarter, and some of its denizens, twinned with the Hampstead of the 1960s. St Leonards, a mile or so to the west, and a much more comfortable fit, was Hackney-on-Sea. Asylum seekers and economic migrants, in melancholy limbo, sat on the pebbles or hitched themselves to the rail, while they waited for bad news. I saw, with a sense of awful inevitability, a photograph of Marine Court.

A cursory viewing was enough, the way that you could lie in bed with nothing but sea and sky outside the window, through that CinemaScope frame of rusting rails. It was going to be tough to live up to the challenge of the wraparound view, angular balconies and curved decks. The promenade running away to the funland arcades, the fishermen's huts like extended sentry boxes. With a roar of Nietzschean overdrive, the concrete superliner of Marine Court was topped out and ready for the champagne bottle in 1938, two years after work had begun. The promotional brochure was a silver-stamped work of art. It referred to our building as a "Hymn to the Sun".

As with the trip on the Balmoral, the brochure speaks of anchoring a mile from shore, to appreciate how the dominant features of the bay were now the Norman castle and Marine Court. Properties left over from the original (and decaying) Burton estate were acquired by an astute estate agent, Commander Bray. The borough engineer Sidney Little had the vision of a concrete city, a marine metropolis, stretching from Hastings to Bexhill, with the boat-building of architects Kenneth Dalgleish and Roger Pullen as the flagship. The promenade made a chain of visual connections between underpasses, shelters, sunken gardens and the spectacular Olympic-size lido at Bulverhythe. Sensuous railway posters celebrated this English Riviera, its bathing beauties and lotus eaters basking in sun lounges below Marine Court. Within a year, the dream was over. The developer had been carried away, as were so many others, by the concept of a beached cruise liner: the suspension of time and dissolution of space. Residential take-up was disappointing. The developers folded with debts of £333,000 (at a period when a pleasant three-bed semi in the town could be had for £750).

War was declared. Marine Court was requisitioned, to be occupied by airmen and cypher clerks. A German fighter-bomber, seeing it as a legitimate target, blew away three floors at the prow. Sidney Little's underground car parks now looked like an anticipation of bunker architecture. The rest of the story is showroom, casino, Witch Doctor disco, unexplained fires, drug rehabilitation unit. Subterranean space was rented to a Nigerian pastor-solicitor, Michael Adelasoye, who was later found guilty of involvement in helping to arrange 383 sham marriages. Adelasoye operated in partnership with a Ukrainian man extradited from Sweden for drug offences and a local vicar with a large church and a very small congregation.

At first, there were regular refits and paint jobs; by the time of the new millennium, Marine Court was crumbling away. Managing agents declared themselves bankrupt. Services collapsed. One lady, driven to the point of breakdown, turned on her taps and left them running, until all the water in the building's system was drained. A brave and determined group decided to apply for enfranchisement, to take over the freehold. After a protracted series of court battles, they succeeded.

The old Marine Court magic, despite all evidence to the contrary, is happening again: an onboard democracy based on unreasoning love. Street-level shops are active once more and catering to incomers. The building is no elegant Bauhaus translation, but a steampunk generator of nautical fantasies. I smiled when the man in the curry house, under the canopy, told me that Lord Longford was a regular and that the Walker Brothers were always dropping in. Then he produced the album. And here they are, with poppadoms and Cobra lager, snapped by the ship's photographer. Late immortals comfortably settled in a corner for the cruise that never ends.

English Heritage is running an exhibition, with guided walks, on the history of Marine Court at the Burton Gallery, Marine Court, St Leonards-on-Sea from 10-12 September. theburtongallery.co.uk

From barely there buildings to ethereal cloud walks, the Venice Biennale is where architects go to dream

Riding the interminably slow accelerato waterbus to the Venice Architecture Biennale gave me time to stare afresh at the rows of theatrical houses and palaces on parade along the banks of the Grand Canal. If, in your mind's eye, you strip away the flamboyant gothic and Renaissance facades, you are left with rows of four-square brick boxes with big chimneys sitting by the water's edge under the vast skies, which did so much to make Turner's reputation as a visionary artist when he painted them. What you have, then, is a city that represent the four elements: earth (bricks), air (sky), fire (chimneys) and water (canal).

Unconsciously, this was more or less the theme of the 2010 Biennale. In an era of financial paucity and increasing concerns about the sensational waste of our capitalist world, its ever bigger buildings and ever more sprawling cities, I had the feeling that many architects from around the world are trying to get back to basics. Not, that is, to lead us into some austere era of rudimentary design and construction, but to help us think of how we can truly do more with less.

The biennale has been curated by Kazuyo Sejima, one half of the Pritzker prize-winning Japanese practice Sanaa. Given that Sanaa specialise in a form of architecture that might be called ethereal – buildings of great transparency, such as the new Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne, that touch the ground as lightly as possible – this idea of doing more with less, and delightfully so, makes sense. Sejima has named this year's exhibition People Meet in Architecture, which, of course, they do. Yet she seems to be asking what this architecture might be if only it weren't such a slave, as it is at the moment, to overwhelming commercial forces.

The 12th International Architecture exhibition (the first was held in 1980) is a panoramic snapshot showing what architects around the world are thinking beyond and aside from the everyday concerns they have with satisfying clients and wooing planning committees. Held in the Arsenale – the one-time hub of the imperial Venetian navy – and the formal exhibition gardens overlooking the lagoon five minutes' walk away, the Biennale aims to encourage fresh thinking about architecture at a time of economic restraint, environmental fears and yet limitless opportunities. Here, in the dreamiest of all cities, is a rare chance for architects to dream and play, as well as address matter-of-fact issues of how we should be building at the moment. As Sejima said at the opening of the show, "an architecture exhibition is a challenging concept, as actual buildings cannot be exhibited". She continued: "As an architect, I feel it's a part of our profession to use space as a medium to express our thoughts. In this way, the atmosphere of the exhibition will be reached through multiple viewpoints rather than through a single orientation. It's a backdrop for people to relate to architecture, for architecture to relate to people, and for people to relate to themselves."

As if to underline this theme, when I walked into the massive Corderie, the old ropeworks buildings of the Arsenale – where one half of the sprawling biennial exhibition is on show – a team of Japanese architects was busy building a house that was barely there.

They were, they said, "thinking of architecture in the air", whereby "even the structures that give a building its very shape may no longer be clear but, rather, voidlike". I see. Or, rather, I didn't, as the house Junya Ishigami and his colleagues were building is made of what appears to be the finest steel threads. Design drawings of the house on the walls of the ropeworks were so fine as to be all but impossible to interpret. It was as if these diligent architects were building one of Italo Calvino's invisible cities, shaping a structure that might or might not be real.

The fantastical cities which Calvino imagined in Invisible Cities were a homage to Venice itself; the least likely of all cities, fictional or real. Ishigami's installation, Architecture as Air, is a riposte to the idea of building ourselves into a hell of our own making. I like the fact that this house has precise measurements – 14 x 4 x 4 metres – as if it might be built for real, and that it has a structure comprising columns, beams and bracing. Yet these are "indeterminate contours lacking true physical form that dissolve into the transparent space rather than structures supporting the building". At one point, it all threatened to fall down.

Next door is an installation called Cloudscapes by Tetsuo Kondo Architects and Matthias Schuler of Transsolar Klima Engineering. Here, visitors walk up the most delicate steel ramps into artificially generated clouds. This has been done before – notably on the banks of Lake Neuchâtel during the 2002 Swiss Expo by the New York architects Diller + Scofidio – yet there is something delightfully otherworldly in walking with your head in the clouds inside a building. All that is solid melts into water vapour, while architectural preconceptions fumble into a foggy state of indeterminancy. Anything might go.

As if to address this feeling, in another room in the Corderie Serpentine Gallery, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has installed a plethora of video screens on which you can sit and watch and listen to ideas about the future from all the Biennale's participants. Or, you can simply gawp at the scintillating, stroboscopic beauty of the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson's Your Split Second House, a cavernous, dark space in which whip-cracks and writhing snakes of water flash in front of your eyes, hinting at thrilling structures that could never really be, and are gone before your eyes even begin to adjust to their uncertain forms.

These installations – clouds, invisible houses, ephemeral structures – are, I think, successful. Whatever practical relevance they have on the future of what we build is not really their point; they are things of beauty, or ways of making us see with wide-open eyes. What might architecture, and the spaces it shapes and cossets, be like if we could only think about it freely?

A team of Spanish architects, engineers and musicians led by Antón García-Abril and Ensamble Studio suggest it's all a matter of balance; to this effect, they have installed two enormous interecting concrete I-beams across an entire room of the Corderie. These appear to be held in check by a rock and a coil spring, suggesting that the line we walk between self-destruction and a positive future is both delicate and dramatic.

In recent Biennales, curators have been been unable to resist the temptation to create exhibition rooms that feel more like the inside of dense academic tomes (indigestible in the Venetian heat) than installations with immediate visual impact. This year, the idea of creating strong yet simple themes and messages has been carried through from the Arsenale to the Giardini, the public park overlooking the lagoon and the lido, well away from the crowds of St Mark's Square.

This is where many of the national pavilions are found, waving flags for the architectural thinking of countries that have been involved with cultural events in Venice for many decades. Those with a more youthful involvement, whether Croatia or Bahrain, Chile or Korea, peddle their cultural wares in the Arsenale.

The Biennale's Golden Lion award for the best national pavilion has been presented to the Kingdom of Bahrain for a display of three simple fishermen's huts uprooted from the coast of Bahrain for the duration of the Venice show. Entitled Reclaim and curated by architects Noura Al-Sayeh and Fuad Al-Ansari, this is a touching display of a vernacular culture fast disappearing in a part of the world where architectural bombast rules. These shacks are elemental and beautiful.

In the spirit of austerity, the Belgian pavilion shows bits and pieces of the fabric of heavily used office buildings to highlight the notion of durability and the nature of wear and tear. So, stretches of rubber-studded floor vie for attention with worn painted steel handrails. It's rather moving: all those Belgian feet and hands making their imprint on the bulky architecture of the often unlovely contemporary office.

The Dutch present models of empty buildings highlighting the gormless enormity of architectural waste; how we concrete over anywhere we can for short-term gain, while governments prattle on about sustainability and building shortages.

The Hungarian pavilion is a maze of bright yellow school pencils hanging from ceilings by cotton threads. The idea, backed up by touching videos showing architects' hands – young and old – drawing, made the simple point that, although it's undeniably clever, computer-aided design in architecture has done little to make us happier or more human. Drawing remains the guiding genius of buildings that touch us.

"What makes a livable city?" ask the Danes. Behind a yellow banner posing this perennial question sits a Carlsberg dispensing machine that, I suppose, answers the question, especially in a Venice that has been as hot and sticky as molten glue this summer. Inside their pavilion, though, the Danes have new plans for Copenhagen. While these portray happy consumers in baseball caps and high-five-style poses in front of jaw-jutting buildings you hope will never get planning permission, it's easy to see that the city-by-the-water presented here is a kind of would-be Venice, seen through computer screens and digital processes, darkly. If only, the Danes seem to be saying, we could have the excess of our contemporary world in cities as magical as Venice.

Flower cities and giant tigers

The Finns ask us to "stay with the elements" and "close to nature"; the Austrians clearly want us to retain something of the innocence of childhood with models of a city centre, one made of flowers, another straddled by a centrepiece building in the guise of a tiger. The British presentation, curated by Vicky Richardson of the British Council and London architects muf, is more obscure. Its professed hope – that we will learn to respect natural Venice as much as we have drawn from its culture and architecture in the past – is represented by, among other things, excepts from Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and a wooden model of the Olympic stadium currently being built in London.

Much of this Biennale is thoughtful, even wistful stuff, the concerns of generations faced with the absurd contradiction of a desire, on the part of a minority of humans, to lead a "good" life, and the reality of the many grasping for the very cities, buildings and consumer trash that will bring us all to a hot and sticky end.

With a light yet distinctive touch, Kazuyo Sejima has done well to shape an event that raises such issues while still delighting us with installations that hint at something soulful and magical beyond the humourless world of "urban regeneration" and architectural inanity. She brings us back to the elemental in architecture, and finally to the elements themselves.

• This article was amended on 1 September 2010. The original incorrectly described Italo Calvino as a Venetian. This has been deleted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is Britain's first fully functioning recycled theatre – made of old nails, pallets and discarded doors. As the Jellyfish opens, Jonathan Glancey examines the rise of 'junkitecture'

^'One man's trash is another's man treasure," says Martin Kaltwasser, screwdriver and saw in hand. The German architect and conceptual artist is rushing to complete the Jellyfish theatre, which stands in a south London playground, 10 minutes' walk from the Globe theatre on the banks of the Thames. To say that this building is junk would be disparaging. And yet junk, of a sort, it is.

The Jellyfish theatre, which opens next week, is being built from the detritus of markets, timberyards and building sites; from redundant school furniture, hand-me-down front doors, recycled nails and pretty much anything that local residents and businesses have contributed – prompted by a public appeal by the Red Room film and theatre company. As work progresses, ever more planks of wood and stuff that would otherwise be "landfill" have been piled up in this playground in Southwark.

Dreamed up two years ago by Red Room's artistic director, Topher Campbell, and its producer, Bryan Savery, the Jellyfish theatre looks, most of all, like a shrine to the humble timber pallet. Until a few weeks ago, these hundreds of pallets were being used to stack fruit and vegetables in Covent Garden market. Cheap, strong and hugely adaptable, they also happen to have a distinctly architectural look, especially when flipped on their sides and turned into walls. Some will be left as they are, others clad with sheets of plywood to keep the rain out and to usher in the darkness needed inside an auditorium.

Kaltwasser and his wife and business partner Folke Köbberling are, in fact, building Britain's first fully functioning theatre made entirely from recycled and reclaimed materials. There are no fixed plans, few drawings; Kaltwasser orchestrates his fellow builders as Mike Leigh does his actors. The building has a strong, if very basic steel frame to keep its structure in check, and yet beyond this basic architectural necessity, all else is improvised: a pallet positioned here, a sheet of plywood there, some MDF on top.

This 120-seat theatre, which fully complies with local building, fire and safety regulations, will enjoy no more than a fleeting life, however. Campbell is busy rehearsing a pair of eco-themed plays that will run from 26 August to 9 October: Oikos (pronounced "ee-kos", the Greek root for economy and ecology) by Simon Wu, and Protozoa by Kay Adshead. After that, the Jellyfish will be dismantled, and its recycled components recycled yet again.

Both plays deal with people rebuilding their lives after political and environmental catastrophe. "They're our response to climate catastrophe," says Campbell, "a condition that might yet come about – partly through our collective greed, our insatiable desire to consume, to waste energy, materials, nature. I imagine how I'd cope if the sky fell in: I'd want to know I could find people who'd be able to create shelters to keep us safe, and allow us space to think about what we were all going to do."

He describes the collaboration as "total theatre": the playwrights have been fully involved with the idea, and reality, of the building, while Kaltwasser and Köbberling have, in turn, read their scripts. The building itself – the idea behind it, the way it's being built, the way it'll feel when completed – is very much a part of the plays. "This is true community theatre: we've been able to involve many different people, from local schoolchildren to office workers across the street."

"It's not just materials we got for free," adds Savery, "but the time and skill of unemployed architects, along with carpenters and people who've walked off the street during their lunch hours." By the end of last week, 81 volunteers had put in 4,200 hours between them over the nine weeks since work began. Eight hundred pallets and 750 square metres of plywood and other sheet material were donated.

"Projects like the 2012 London Olympics have promised public engagement," says Savery, "yet the entire Olympics site is walled and strictly out of bounds. We're a completely open stage, trying to prove that local people can create their own public projects. We found our own site by walking around, found Martin and Folke by asking around, asked Southwark if it was possible. And off we went. You can do it, too, without developers, quangos, huge professional teams – and with anyone taking part."

Well, not quite anyone. A hand-painted notice insists that no drugs or alcohol be brought on site. This is not some trippy 1960s-style architectural happening, but a serious, if good-natured, public building project.

Just nipping out to mow the roof

Building from found materials is, of course, nothing new. Humans (and animals) have always done this. The 1960s saw, however, a heady boom in self-build, initiated by all those alternative lifestyle movements. Self-build tended to fall into two schools: shelters shaped from found materials and other bric-a-brac; and buildings created by local communities with their own hands, to formal architectural designs.

The latter have included the self-build housing programmes initiated by architects like Walter Segal, the Swiss-born British architect who developed a system of prefabricated timber houses built by local people to his simple, elegant designs. In the 1970s, four such schemes were built in Lewisham, London, on sites unsuitable for conventional council houses. Segal's homes – clean, modern, environmentally sound and sometimes crowned with flowering turf roofs – are much sought-after today.

The alternative to Segal's style of self-build was the kind of free-spirited hippy homes that sprung up in self-consciously alternative communities, notably in California. Such shelters might be built from anything going. Their spirit lives on today in the guise of "benders". Hidden away in the English countryside, these simple shelters, made of coppiced hazel and willow covered in army-surplus canvas and other easily sourced natural materials, are part of a fine tradition of independent and ecologically savvy homemaking. Then there are the recent reports of the campsites on London's perimeters, filled with increasing numbers of commuters who can't afford the capital's house prices.

"It's definitely political," says Campbell of the Jellyfish project. "Martin and Folke see it as an architecture of resistance, against the ways people are so often just passive users of the buildings they're given by politicians, developers and their architects." He points to the Shard, designed by Renzo Piano, a mighty developer's tower rising close by, behind high guarded walls.

Kaltwasser (born in Munster in 1965) and Köbberling (from Kassell and four years younger) have been working together in Berlin, and more recently in Los Angeles, for the past 12 years. Kaltwasser received a conventional architectural education yet found himself a fish out of water in architects' offices. In 1989, he built his first house, from found materials, in central Berlin. He expected locals to hate it. They didn't. In fact, Kaltwasser found himself popular, and even cooked for by neighbours.

Better than a boring mall

Since then, he and Köbberling have built several remarkable buildings in the same vein. Two years ago, the Wysing Arts Centre, near Cambridge, commissioned Amphis, a large patchwork house assembled in just six weeks by 40 volunteers. Used, appropriately, for informal meetings and spontaneous events, it was made of materials thrown out by the University of Cambridge. The pair also cooked up a wholly unlikely urban interloper, the Werdplatz-palais, a social centre and soup kitchen built in 2008 in Zurich, cheek-by-jowl with the stock exchange.

When the three-month permit the authorities granted it expired, the structure was dismantled and recycled into a play space for local immigrant children, who also helped build it. At the end of 2008, that, too, was dismantled. "These buildings were short-lived," says Kaltwasser, "but it was great, in such a highly regulated city, to let people with so little economic and political power build for themselves and for their needs, rather than giving them more boring public places and shopping malls. Many people were sad when the buildings had to go."

So how did they come up with the name Jellyfish? "People find jellyfish a little disturbing," he says. "And yet they're fragile creatures. They need the clean waters we're making dirty. And they appear to come and go, just like that." And just like Kobberling and Kaltwasser's buildings, too.

• For more information on the Jellyfish theatre and its performances visit oikosproject.com

From the breathtaking descent into Santos Dumont to Jeddah's tent-like structure, Rowan Moore selects his favourite 10 airports

El Prat de Llobregat, Barcelona

Most airports are in denial, or at least their architects are. They think they're works of transport engineering, when really they're shopping malls with a transport function attached – BAA is said to make more money out of retail than flights. Barcelona's Terminal 2, completed in 1991, makes a virtue of this fact. It treats the airport as an unusual kind of city, with broad urbane avenues, highly polished purplish marble, big glass walls, dignified concrete and ample proportions. As a result it is much more relaxing than airports where you feel like a piece of baggage on its way to the carousel. Its architect, Ricardo Bofill, has recently also completed the rebuilt Terminal 1.

Santos Dumont, Rio de Janeiro

Since the 1998 closure of Kai Tak, Hong Kong, with its thrilling descent past mountains and above apartment blocks, the approach to Santos Dumont Rio de Janeiro, is unrivalled as the best in the world. Planes wheel past the Sugarloaf mountain and down to a short waterside landing strip that requires special training for pilots. Then a stroll through the terminal takes you almost into the heart of a great city – which is air travel as it should be but almost never is. The airport, which now serves only domestic flights, is named after a great Brazilian aviator and dandy, and its original terminal is a refined work of 1930s modernism.

Dulles Washington DC

Before his death at the age of 51, Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen designed two celebrations of the jet age that reinvented the design of airports. One, the freeform TWA terminal at JFK, has been compromised by later additions, and is currently closed for refurbishment. The other is Washington Dulles, built in 1962, whose concrete roof, concave side down, hangs like a canvas between rows of angled pillars. It pioneered the idea of the sweeping roof as a metaphor for flight that has since become a well-worn theme of airport design, while its white, temple-like form also has some of the gravitas ofWashington's political monuments.

Kansai Osaka

After Norman Foster's Stansted of 1991 gave new impetus to Saarinen's big-roof concept, Renzo Piano's Kansai airport gave it its most impressive realisation in 1994. The roof rises and falls like a big wave, before neatly morphing into the long, tapering tubes that get you to the departure gates. Built on an artificial island, it looks beautiful from above, with all the complexity of an airport resolved into a single silvery object. It also deals with the inevitable retail better than most, by stowing it into deep canyons under the roof. The fact that the island used to sink at an alarming rate need not worry you too much.

Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong

Norman Foster's practice Foster and Partners has designed three impressive airports – Stansted, Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong, and the enormous new Terminal 3 in Beijing. Of these Hong Kong gets my vote, Stansted being too compromised by later changes, while Beijing has slightly queasy-making Chinese references: it is allegedly dragon-like, and takes its red-gold colours from the Forbidden City. Hong Kong has a calm, rhythmic series of vaults with views through big glass walls to planes and mountains. As at Stansted and Beijing the design still gets embarrassed by the presence of shops, as if it were hoping they would go away. They won't, and airport architects should get used to it.

Barajas, Madrid

Barajas, Madrid, by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, is yet another swoopy roof, but the simple idea of lining the ceiling with bamboo gives it a different feeling. It is soothing, rather than mechanical. Steel struts are painted in all colours of the rainbow, grading from red to violet along the length of the building – a potentially cheesy idea that comes off. The joyfulness of Barajas compared with the clunkier Terminal 5 at Heathrow (which was designed by the same architects) says much about the way this country goes about getting big buildings built.

Charles de Gaulle, Paris

The original terminal building of Charles de Gaulle airport, completed in 1974, is the sort of futuristic fantasy for which the French have a special talent. A great concrete cylinder, its central void is criss-crossed by glass tubes, enclosing smooth-moving travelators as if in a Dalek city. On the outside, roads sweep up high on its flanks on vertiginous bridges. Designed by Paul Andreu, a French architect whose most famous work it is, it is playful and inspiring at the same time. Pleasure in its design is limited, however, by knowing about the fatal collapse of part of the later Terminal 2E, in 2004.

Banjul Gambia

Banjul Airport, Gambia, wins a prize for its sheer indifference to all the usual clichés and conventions of airport design. True, it goes like many others for something a bit wing-like, but the gratuitous projections at its sides are nothing like the swoops of Saarinen or Piano. It also goes, for no particular reason, for an arch in its centre with a bigger inverted arch above. A tongue-like canopy then sticks out from the mouth-like arch. The work of the Senegalese Pierre Goudiaby Atepa, its main design principle would appear to be to do stuff for the sheer hell of it.

Changi, Singapore

I don't know why so many airports are designed as metaphors for flight. Why do you need a metaphor when you've got the real thing? Why not have a metaphor for the ground on which you're landing? In any case Singapore Changi Airport has always opted instead for symbols – not metaphors exactly – of opulence. They like fish tanks, fountains and verdant planting, and school parties are taken round in obedient crocodiles to admire it all. Since 2008 it has also included its Terminal 3, by American architects SOM. The roof is as flat as the many football pitches it equals in area, but is fitted with an intricate system of shutters and louvres that filter the light in intriguing pixellated patterns. It's a bit bling, but in a nice way.

King Abdulaziz Jeddah

SOM also designed Jeddah airport, which, as the place of arrival for Mecca, handles a huge increase in passenger numbers during the annual hajj. SOM created a 120-acre canopy composed as a series of tents. It could have been patronising, and I confess I haven't seen it in person, but the effect looks impressive in photographs. It was completed in 1981, and it's hard to imagine an American practice being given a commission of such sensitivity to Muslims now. Indeed, at the time of writing, someone has described SOM on Wikipedia as "futki", which in the Bangladeshi dialect of Sylheti means "arsehole".

City takes out legal action over ownership of Jacob Wrey Mould's landmark designs found in a skip 50 years ago

At some point in the 1950s a craftsman called Buckley was working on a site in lower Manhattan when he came across a stash of papers dumped in a skip. They were a set of architectural drawings in watercolours of plans for city parks including details of fountains, clocks, terraces and other structures.

What probably caught Buckley's eye was the stately nature of the designs and their elaborate colouring. Recognising their innate value, he took a pile of more than 100 of the drawings home and filed them away for safe keeping.

More than 50 years later they have become the subject of a $1m (£640,000) lawsuit lodged at the New York supreme court. The legal action was brought by the city's authorities against the late craftsman's son, Sam Buckley, and Christie's, the auctioneers through whom he tried to sell the drawings.

They were the work of Jacob Wrey Mould, a British architect who came to New York in 1853 to design a Unitarian church in Fourth Avenue and 20th Street. Though the building has long been pulled down, in its day it was quite a sensation with its striped facade of red and cream stone earning it the nickname Church of the Holy Zebra.

Mould, an irascible man who was not much liked but greatly admired, went on to collaborate with Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park. Together they planned the original buildings of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while Mould also had a large hand in Belvedere Castle and the carvings of the Bethesda Terrace, both in Central Park. Later, he was seminal in the creation of other quintessential New York features such as Morningside and Riverside Parks.

Most of the drawings were signed by Mould. They display his love of vibrant colours as a student of the designer and polychrome theorist Owen Jones with whom he designed a room in Buckingham Palace. They include plans for structures that were built, such as Bethesda Fountain, as well as ones that were not – a set of street lamps for Park Avenue, for instance.

Every one was stamped with the badge of the New York Parks Department, for whom Mould worked from 1857 to shortly before his death in 1886.

When Christie's was commissioned by the younger Buckley to sell 86 of the 127 drawings in his late father's possession, the auction house contacted the city authorities for help with valuing the works and to ask whether New York wanted the first chance to buy them.

But the city saw an invaluable historic collection that should never have left its public ownership.

"They are the kind of thing we would never throw away, but for whatever reason they were erroneously discarded or lost," said Gerald Singleton, the lawyer representing the city. "Once we looked at them we realised that the city remains the owner of these drawings."

It has persuaded the New York court to put a preliminary restraining order that prevents Buckley or Christie's from selling any of the drawings.

In return, the city has promised to back off from its legal threats and to attempt to reach a settlement.

"We're confident this will end amicably," Singleton said.

If New York regains the drawings, it has pledged to use them when renovating historic parts of the city.

Lucille Gordon, Mould's biographer, said the documents were also hugely important in the understanding of the architect himself. "He is a piece of our history – his work is scattered all over New York state. Yet so few papers of any kind have been left behind, and any scrap that Mould touched has a value."

Jacob Wrey Mould

Born 1825 in Bloomsbury in London, and educated at King's College School.

Studied under Owen Jones, the so-called master of polychromy, travelling to the Alhambra in Spain.

Took part in the building of Dorchester House on Park Lane and in the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, moving to New York soon afterwards.

Started work with the city's park department in 1857, rising by 1870 to be its architect-in-chief.

Apart from a five-year stint in Lima in Peru from 1874, he spent most of his later life working for the New York parks.

Also renowned as a distinguished pianist and organist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The futuristic city in Kazakhstan is just the latest in the growing phenomenon of a capital from zero

"Peas and beans! Peas and beans!" The famous Japanese architect was in his office, high in a Tokyo tower, its walls crowded with framed honours and diplomas. Assistants of exceptional beauty shimmered in with tea, but what he wanted to talk about was pulses. Rising prosperity in China would lead to rising meat consumption, and in turn a global protein crisis. It was the greatest problem, he said, facing mankind today. The solution lay in Kazakhstan, the vast former Soviet republic, for whose president the architect, Kisho Kurokawa, was masterplanning a new capital. This country, to the south of Russia, stretches from the eastern edge of Europe almost to Mongolia. For Kurokawa it offered ample opportunity for growing peas and beans, and – in a symbolic way – his plan would help. It was based on the interweaving of city and nature, with swaths of green between the buildings. It represented an idea of interdependence of which pulse-growing on an immense scale would be the practical outcome.

This meeting was in 2001, and Kurokawa died in 2007, but his city is now there, more or less following his plan. There are plenty of parks and trees. Called Astana, it is the world's latest example of a rare but persistent type, the capital from zero. It is in a line that includes St Petersburg, Washington DC, Canberra, Ankara and Brasilia and like them it provokes a question: can a city, in all its teeming complexity, really be planned? Or does the attempt lead only to a synthetic simulacrum, a kind-of city that is not quite the real thing?

To look at, Astana is so strange that it has one grasping for images. It's a space station, marooned in an ungraspable expanse of level steppe, its name (to English speakers) having the invented sound of a science fiction writer's creation. It's a city of fable or dream, as recounted by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Except it's not quite so magical: it's also like a battery-operated plastic toy, all whirring noises and flashing colours, of a kind sold by the city's street vendors.

Astana's ornaments include a 62-metre-high silver pyramid, designed by British architects Foster + Partners, giant gold-green cones and a gold orb resting on a structure of erupting white steel. At night its buildings go purple, pink, green and yellow. Astana's latest, most technically ambitious addition is a 150-metre-high translucent tent, also by Lord Foster. Called Khan Shatyr, a single leaning mast props its roof, which offers shelter from a harsh climate to a shopping and entertainment complex underneath. It follows a familiar Foster strategy, to be seen in the Great Court of the British Museum, or his airports at Stansted, Hong Kong and Beijing, which is to create an impressively engineered roof – a thing to be looked at and admired but not inhabited – hovering over a lower, less ordered, zone where the activity of the buildings, in this case shops and theme-park rides, takes place. This strategy, derived from the geodesic domes which the visionary American designer Buckminster Fuller once proposed throwing over whole cities, makes for striking architecture but also for awkward clashes where the two zones meet. Top and bottom seem to be different worlds.

Khan Shatyr opened last month with an extravagant celebration which coincided with the 70th birthday of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who is the beginning and end of everything that happens in Astana. The building is there "because the idea came from the president", says its German-born manager: that there were four other malls within a square kilometre "didn't matter for him". The gold orb on the white steel tower, which signifies the egg laid annually on the tree of life by the mythical bird Samruk, was designed by Nazarbayev himself. When Nazarbayev commissioned Foster to design his Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, he told them he wanted it pyramid-shaped, which may be the first and only time a client has told the mighty Foster what a building should look like, and been obeyed.

Such cities are often the work of a single strong man. There is a museum of the founder in Astana, as there are of Kemal Atatürk in Ankara and President Kubitschek in Brasilia, pharaonic insurance against the afterlife that contains such things as Nazarbayev's grandfather's seal of office as a local judge. There is the president's palace, which stands on a long axis linking the two Foster works, the tent and the pyramid, and the golden orb. The palace is a version of the White House, improved by the addition of a blue dome. Also by its dominating location: the American original is placed off-centre from Washington's Mall, signifying a separation of powers that is not quite the Kazakh style.

The common view of Nazarbayev, among those western politicians who have one, is that he is by some distance the best of the extremely bad bunch running the former Soviet republics of central Asia. Margaret Thatcher has written a foreword to Nazarbayev's book The Kazakhstan Way, praising him for throwing off "the Soviet yolk [sic]". He established himself as a reformer in the 1980s, enough for Gorbachev to ask him, unsuccessfully, to be prime minister of the Soviet Union. The west was also extremely grateful to him for giving up his ballistic missiles when the collapse of the Soviet Union left him the master of the world's fourth-largest nuclear arsenal.

Kazakhstan may rank 142nd in the world press freedom index, and 120th in the corruption perception index, and he may win elections and referendums with suspiciously high votes of 91% and 95%, but – goes the pro-Nazarbayev argument – nobody else could have stabilised his country's potentially explosive ethnic combinations, and ridden the violent post-Soviet economic storms. This argument is set out in Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan, an eloquent, if oily, book by the British former minister Jonathan Aitken. Among its gems is a description of the romance between the president and his future wife, which flourished after an accident at a steel works: "While the flames of the blast furnace were damped down, the fires of love ignited."

Aitken reports how his subject, as a young champion of steelworkers' rights, was scathing about both grandiose building projects and the decision to locate a steel plant in a site with an appalling climate. Yet he chose to build Astana, which can fairly be called grandiose, in a place that had been notable previously for its Soviet penal colonies and where the temperature runs from -40C to 40C (-40 to 104F). His logic was that the previous capital, Almaty, was too close to China, too congested, and prone to earthquakes.One can guess that, as for other rulers, building a new capital gave Nazarbayev a place he could control, made on his own terms. In keeping with his status as a better-than-average dictator, this is done subtly: Astana is not littered with statues and images of its maker, and when his followers suggested that it should be named after him, he modestly demurred. (Although the somewhat neutral "Astana" – it means "capital" – might indicate that the space is being kept open for a renaming in the future.)

Instead you hear, again and again, that things are the way they are "because the president wants it", which is delivered as a sufficient and unarguable statement. The shopping centre manager says it, as does the waiter serving horse steak. President Medvedev of Russia said that Nazarbayev "has given this city not only his work but also his soul". He wanted the city, and he specified its monuments in detail. He had his government officials, who initially left their families in more hospitable Almaty, shipped in. David Nelson, of Foster + Partners, describes long design meetings with the president: "He had thought about the building. That's what's impressive."

What he wanted he got, thanks partly to oil revenues from the distant Caspian Sea, which Nazarbayev claimed for Kazakhstan in a protracted haggle with Boris Yeltsin – closing the deal with the help of vodka and a map doodled on a napkin, which is now in the Museum of the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Like Gulf cities, Astana floats on an exhalation of petrodollars. Like Gulf cities and new Chinese cities such as Shenzhen, Astana inspires wonder that it is there at all; but while having some buildings of eye-aching ugliness, it has a greater sense of order. At street level in Dubai all is congestion. Here it is trimmed hedges, well-behaved traffic, well-kept paving and a complete lack of litter, or of visible signs of prostitution, drug-taking or beggary. It most resembles the controlled cleanliness of Singapore.

The world's most famous Kazakh is the fictional Borat, but people in Astana are nothing like him. Except, perhaps for a taxi driver who growled like a tomcat whenever he saw a woman. In general Astanans are placid and dignified. They gather in the hour or so around dusk, when the hammering heat of the day gives way to deliciously balmy air, and promenade in the city's grand avenue. Children career over the pavements in electric cars like unfenced dodgems, while everyone gasps obediently at the pre-programmed fountain displays. The avenue is decorated with topiary giraffes and elephants, and vast swirling carpets of brightly coloured bedding plants. There are artificial trees, made of steel rods, blossoming with pink or orange lights and the plastic roof of Khan Shatyr now joins the display, lit from within with a spectrum of disco colours. Sam Cooke's Wonderful World plays from the shrubberies. The place offers childish delights, laid on by the unseen hand of a benevolent daddy.

There is not, yet, much more to Astana than this. It doesn't have bohemian quarters, or a rich nightlife, or hidden surprises. It feels sedated. The striking architecture is combined with a lack of excitement in the street life, as if the design of buildings were a cipher for risk and drama. These are very early days, of course, and over the decades Astana might mature into something different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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