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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 2010 Riba Stirling shortlist is out and, as usual, the committee has missed some of the best candidates

There is a band of buildings, skilful and brave in their design, that will feature prominently in future histories of current architecture. Some are world famous, some are hugely popular, some represent new ideas surfacing for the first time. All share the same badge of honour. They did not win the £20,000 Riba Stirling prize, the award for "the architects of the building which has made the greatest contribution to British architecture in the past year".

These buildings include the Eden Project in Cornwall, Tate Modern, Selfridges in Birmingham, the New Art Gallery in Walsall, Will Alsop's Hotel du Department in Marseille, Zaha Hadid's Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg and her BMW Central Building in Leipzig. The British Library in St Pancras, London, should also have won: although unfashionable and controversial when it opened, its quality becomes more apparent with each passing year.

Meanwhile the prize has been awarded to projects that have since subsided into obscurity. These include the Magna Centre in Rotherham, whose victory in 2001 seemed to surprise even its architect, Chris Wilkinson. The prize has an instinct for the compromise candidate, for the one least likely to frighten any horses.

This year some exceptional buildings haven't even made the shortlist, announced last week. One is the Nottingham Contemporary Art Centre by Caruso St John, a building that responds professionally to a demanding brief, budget and site. It is the work of client and architects who are both good and committed. Its galleries are scrupulously designed for the display of art. It deals beautifully with sloping terrain, allowing internal and external public routes to run through it. More than that, it tries something unusual, which is to see how ornament can be used on a modern building. It is clad in pale green concrete panels imprinted with lace patterns, creating a play of apparent lightness and actual heaviness.

Idea is translated into material, which is something architects should do. Nottingham Contemporary stands outside the usual run of decent-but-predictable modern architecture of which there is plenty. It is a public, civic building that makes a contribution to its city. It is an opportunity to recognise buildings north of Watford, which is something Stirling juries sometimes worry about, but the opportunity was not taken.

The list also omits the British Embassy in Warsaw by Tony Fretton, who must wonder what he has done to upset the Stirling fairy. Last year Fretton was the victim of a bizarre and nasty press campaign, which complained that two of the five prize judges were predisposed in his favour. This overlooked the fact that the other three weren't, or that, year after year, the Stirling jury is loaded in favour of the established and middlebrow.

As it turned out, the supposedly biased jury didn't choose Fretton's shortlisted entry, the Fuglsang art museum in Denmark. Instead they opted for Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre in Hammersmith, London, by Richard Rogers's practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour. This is a nice building, but it wasn't pushing any boundaries to reward a small project by a 76-year-old already amply recognised.

Fretton is not an ingratiating architect. His plain buildings can look ordinary in photographs. Nor is he a slick minimalist. What's good about his work is the subtle relationships he creates between building, people, landscape and – when they are galleries – art. It is surely part of the job of prizes like the Stirling to draw attention to the un-obvious, the things whose qualities are easily overlooked.

Rather than Nottingham and Warsaw, the shortlist this year's prize includes two schools, and a house and studio built by an architect couple for themselves. All are good buildings, designed by lovely people, and it's possible that the jury wanted to send a message to the government by including the schools. Look, they seem to be saying to the school-axing Michael Gove, the design of places of learning does matter. But the house doesn't open up new ideas the way Nottingham does, or have its public importance, while the prize's role is to recognise the best architecture rather than send messages.

Also on the shortlist is the extended Ashmolean museum, Oxford, by Rick Mather Architects. This earns its place for the way it organises a complex array of galleries behind the museum's original, Grade I-listed building. But it displays a cloth ear for materials, structure and detail. Its glass and steel balustrades are in jarring shopping-mall moderne, and if the choice was between this and Nottingham, the latter should have won.

The good thing about this year's list is that it includes the two projects that were always the most likely and deserving winners, Zaha Hadid's MAXXI (Museum of 21st Century Arts) in Rome, and the Neues museum in Berlin by David Chipperfield with Julian Harrap. The latter is a beautifully poised, meticulous, but also creative shaping of a new museum out of the bombed-out ruin of an old one. It is a smash hit in its home city. It represents a way of doing architecture, where the signature of the architect is not always apparent, that breaks with the icon-building of recent years.

MAXXI is a Wagnerian blast from the brass section of the orchestra. It is the consummation of years of imagining and fighting for new ways of forming and arranging buildings. It has flaws, but it is a magnificent urban experience, a passeggiata played out on multiple intersecting levels. Hadid, the most famous woman architect in history, and possibly the most famous living British architect, has never been recognised by the Stirling. In Stirling-think, this would be a reason for giving her the prize.

To choose between these two is tough – Berlin just shades it for me – but if either wins the Stirling will break its habit of shirking the most powerful works. The thing to fear would be a split jury when the winner is chosen in October, with a third, compromise candidate surging through. Then the Stirling really would have lost all claim to be about the best architecture, as opposed to the smooth management of judging committees.

A new building at a centre devoted to eco awareness is more than just a checklist of green materials and practices. It is also a triumph of modernism and minimalism

It's not often that you judge a new building by its smell, but here you sniff the place like a sommelier: old barn, straw, notes of cedar and cow dung, must, something faintly citric. Nothing like the usual pong of new carpet and plastic paint.

This is because the building in question, the Wales Institute for Sustainable Education (Wise), is trying as hard as it can to use natural building materials – "Basically plants and earth," to quote one of its architects, Pat Borer. Also animals, as in addition to a timber frame, rammed earth walls and a coating of lime and hemp, it uses sheep's wool for thermal insulation.

It is designed by two architects in collaboration, Borer and David Lea. Wise is part of Cat, the Centre for Alternative Technology, which, once you've got past its irritating way with acronyms, is an impressively persistent organisation. It is a product of the first great wave of eco-awareness, in the 1970s, when no one had heard of global warming, but a lot of people were worried that oil was running out. There was also a general feeling that mankind was ravaging the Earth and that this couldn't be a good thing.

Cat was founded by the old Etonian Gerard Morgan-Grenville, with the vague-seeming aim to "show the nature of the problem and show ways of going forward". It was located in an old slate quarry halfway up a steep hill near Machynlleth, in a remote part of mid-Wales, almost where the land runs out into Cardigan Bay. Over the years, Cat built prototypes for ecological ways of living: a building made of straw bales, wind turbines, the filtering of sewage through reed beds until it becomes almost-clean water. School parties and visiting groups of Chinese and Africans now roam the site.

Most of the site has a ramshackle and ad-hoc air. There are still DIY solar heaters, made of radiators painted black to absorb heat and placed under glass, from 30 or so years ago. There is the broken blade of an ex-wind turbine. You can ascend the steep hillside to the centre by way of a lift powered by water from a high-up reservoir. "It is truly zero-emission transport," says Borer. "It runs on rain," he adds, amid light drizzle on a day when the rest of Britain is washed by a heatwave. "What could be better?"

The site is powered by solar power, a boiler burning wood chips and wind turbines. It is connected to the national grid, to which it gives a surplus of electricity. The centre stays true to its co-operative origins: all staff, whatever their status, earn between £13,000 and £16,000 a year, except for those on academic pay scales. Wales was a refuge of choice for hippies escaping the big city, but this work of 1970s dreaminess has shown staying power.

Its £4.5m new building takes it to a new level of ambition and seriousness, but misadventures during the building process almost caused it to close. Its main purpose is to provide courses for masters students, so it has an auditorium, seminar rooms, bedrooms and a bar.

Clearly, the building has to practise what the centre preaches. Many in the world of sustainable design like to pick holes in another's work, to point out which of the panoply of interconnected issues a given project has failed to address – what materials, where they come from, what energy was used in their transport, what will happen to them after demolition. Cat has exhaustively logged every aspect of its building, including each journey made to and from the site, and has made the data the subject of a research project. As green building is still an inexact science, Cat wants to know what works and what doesn't.

The energy used in building is as important as that used once it is built. According to Borer, who was once on the staff of Cat before he set up his own practice, "a 'zero-energy' house can use 30 years' worth of energy to build" because it uses materials such as steel, concrete and plastic. At Wise, they have used thick walls of rammed earth and avoided PVC, an especially energy-intensive material, in pipes and electrical insulation. They use durable woods such as oak and larch, because lesser timbers need to be treated with toxic chemicals and therefore become toxic waste when they are disposed of. The building does use aluminium, a taboo material for some green builders, but sparingly. "We use it for its wonderful properties, like its strength. We wouldn't use it for things like ceiling tiles, where you could just as well use another material."

But the issue for sustainable architecture, beyond whether it actually works, is whether it is architecture. Is it, in other words, just a checklist of materials and techniques, bound together by some calculations, or does it give its own quality to the way built spaces look and feel? By this, I don't mean it has to wear its greenness on its sleeve, that it has to festoon itself with flapping windmills and turf roofs to prove its credentials.

Here, the less talkative of the two Wise architects comes into his own. David Lea, bearded and quietly spoken, looks every inch an architect who has spent the past four decades in rural seclusion. With his interest in natural materials, local to a building's site, he has sometimes been ploughing a solitary furrow. He received the equivocal honour of being praised by Prince Charles for a building he did for student farmers in Cirencester, Gloucestershire. His best-known work is a tiny house for an artist, of mud and thatch, that looked like an upturned boat.

He studied, however, under Leslie Martin, one of the architects of the Royal Festival Hall, and Lea is not some wizard of the Celtic fringe or purveyor of mud huts for hobbits. His building is poised and spare, in the manner of some of the best modernist architecture. It adapts cleverly to the site's rollercoaster terrain, creating multiple levels out of its ups and downs.

It also turns, in several directions, to face the abundant nature around it. One space is oriented towards a distant view of mountains and an access gallery runs past an impressive cliff of slate. A courtyard collects all the rain into pools. A big bay window catches views in several directions. It's simple stuff, but a lot of architects wouldn't bother with such things and it's nicely done. It creates a rapport with nature that does not have any measurable effect on CO2 emissions, but is surely a necessary part of the ethos of being green.

It could have been built of concrete and steel and almost felt the same, but only almost. The choice of materials subtly changes the feel of the place, as well as its carbon footprint. There's that smell, but also a different touch and acoustic. It's not spectacular, or fanatical, but it shows one way of doing sustainable architecture in the fullest sense: not just a pile of box-ticking, but making spaces.

The designer of this year's Serpentine pavilion is also hard at work on another of his radical buildings, right next to St Paul's

If you want to know the difference between Britain and France, you could do worse than study the pronouncements that Jean Nouvel and his office make about their work. "This is not a tower," they say of something that definitely is a tower. "It is more an emergence." Or, of a museum project: "Everything is designed to evoke an emotional response to the primary object, to protect it from light, but also to capture that rare ray of light indispensable to make it vibrate and awaken its spirituality."

Over here, this would be professional suicide. Project managers would reckon that such fancy talk must add at least 30% to the budget. Baffled clients would pass on to someone who didn't make them feel stupid. In France, such utterances, delivered by the black-clad and – but for his beetling eyebrows – hairless Nouvel are part of his success. It may be a cliche, but the French really do like an intellectual show; we mistrust it.

We tolerate it in foreigners, however, enough for Nouvel to be the architect of this year's Serpentine pavilion, which will be unveiled this week. He has also designed One New Change, a shopping and office building now being built to the east of St Paul's cathedral, a brooding, rock-like thing that Prince Charles tried to stop with one of his secret letters. (As a member of the competition jury which selected Nouvel for this job, I recall a more direct, less Rive Gauche approach when he presented. He was canny enough to know this would play better with this Anglo-Saxon audience.)

Nouvel's biggest idea is what he calls "dematerialisation", the "interplay of light and materiality", which "gives the impression that materials have vanished". He talks of "fragile effects", "fleeting moments" and "precise mists" in his work. In the Fondation Cartier in Paris, multiple planes of glass cause the facade to dissolve into reflections and transparencies. At One New Change, he has chosen a kind of glazing with a matt and grainy surface, which is intended to be stone-like while still also glassy.

Now aged 64, he originally wanted to be an artist, but was persuaded by his parents to enter the solider profession of architecture. He worked for Claude Parent, an intellectually driven architect famous for his collaborations with artists such as Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely, and the philosopher Paul Virilio, who controversially found beauty in the concrete bunkers built by the occupying Nazis in the second world war. He then set up on his own, designing strange, postmodern confections very different from the slicker stuff he does now.

Nouvel's big break was to design L'Institut du Monde Arabe of 1987, one of the grands projets with which President Mitterrand left his mark in Paris. This was more refreshing and less bombastic than most, with a 10-storey wall of light-filtering steel shutters. Inspired by the decorated screens of Cairo houses, and operating like camera shutters, it was the first of the magic surfaces that are now Nouvel's trademark.

Since then, the magic surface has taken many forms. There was a hotel in Bordeaux wrapped in a rusty metal mesh, and the unbuilt Tour Sans Fins, a 1,400ft skyscraper in La Défense designed to fade into the sky. It was backed by the tycoon Robert Maxwell, whose financial support proved as evanescent as the architecture. The Gherkin-like Torre Agbar in Barcelona, built for the water company, is wrapped in glass that "evokes water: smooth and continuous, shimmering and transparent, its materials reveal themselves in nuanced shades of colour and light". His design for the Serpentine seems to depend heavily on its bright shade of red, the colour of London pillar boxes and buses, and Hyde Park's complementary lush summer green. It will be so pervasively and completely red that it calls to mind Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red Sea, an all-red picture of 1884 by the prototype conceptual artist Alphonse Allais.

Nouvel has also designed the controversial Louvre Abu Dhabi, where jewels of French patrimony will be displayed for payment to the French government of a cool $1.3bn. Here, Nouvel's magic surface is a shallow, inverted bowl, perforated with a web of holes, to filter powerful sunlight into an ever-shifting pattern of light and shade. It will be his most spectacular work to date.

Nouvel says that the power of the screen, the ability to compress three dimensions on to two, is characteristic of the modern age, as is the ever-increasing virtuosity of building materials. Certainly, his approach works well with the way large buildings are now usually built: the structure and the cladding are treated as separate, almost independent, entities. The first is more the domain of engineers and contractors; the second is where architects have most licence for their creative flourishes.

He also talks of the power of the image and at One New Change his biggest move is to create a powerful new view of the dome of St Paul's, which makes it into a snapshot, or an icon. The dome also gets reflected, in a typically Nouvelian game, on the fragmented surfaces of the building and with different degrees of clarity and opacity.

But it's tempting to think that Nouvel's love of two dimensions is partly because he is uncomfortable working with three. Nouvel doesn't draw, which was once considered an essential skill in the shaping of architectural space.

When it comes to organising volumes, or making rooms, his buildings are often rudimentary. Their scale is often awkward. The aqueous skin of the Torre Agbar makes it a fascinating object on the skyline – more so than the Gherkin – but at close quarters, where it crashes into ground level, it is horrible.

Nouvel's method is to translate crazy concepts into sensuous surfaces and striking images, on which his projects stand or fall. They can be beautiful, or intriguing, or a bit bling or a bit disco, or sometimes plain unconvincing. In those projects where the making of a surface is not the main concern, things tend to fall apart. One example is the catastrophic Musée du Quai Branly, close to the Eiffel Tower, an inchoate and clumsy series of spaces that do nothing for the ethnographic collections they house.

Few architects have the ability to be as good and as bad, at the same time, as Nouvel. He shows how far a contemporary architect can go by working almost entirely in the realm of image. He also shows that other things, like detail, and the shaping of rooms and sequences of spaces – the things he doesn't bother with all that much – do still matter.

He was a slightly surprising choice for the Serpentine pavilion. He is not quite a giant at the level of Frank Gehry, or of the moment in the way that last year's designers, Sanaa, were. The pavilion is supposed to be by architects who haven't built in London, which the admittedly unfinished bulk of One New Change contradicts. I hope they weren't thinking that his pavilion would be a calling card to the wealth of Abu Dhabi, where Nouvel is building his Louvre. But it, like its architect, won't be dull. It will also be very, very red.

The Moore family has lived at Hancox, a large, rambling Sussex house, for five generations. Rowan Moore recalls his childhood there and how its ramshackle charms fired his lifelong passion for architecture

A broad stair, the work of a pretentious 16th-century owner, winds up from a dark hall towards a bright landing, the shifts in light modulated by wobbly plaster and oak. Tall timber shafts rise to the ceiling, warped in memory of their former life as tree trunks in the nearby woods. Newel posts end in handsome carved finials shaped like poppy heads, one of them violently mutilated by an alcoholic, in the time when this was a Church of England home for inebriates.

Weaponry is lodged here and there: a halberd, flintlock pistols, bayonets, a boomerang and a German helmet, with eagle-and-swastika insignia, taken by my uncle when he was liberated from his prisoner-of-war camp in 1945. Ancestors and obscure relatives gaze out of large, darkened portraits. A portrait of my great-grandfather, in his robes as a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, is propped against a wall, waiting for decades for someone to get round to putting it up.

This is Hancox, the house where I grew up, and where five generations of my family have lived. It is now the subject of a moving book by my sister Charlotte, who lives there. Based on the letters, diaries and mementos accumulated in its attic, cupboards and bookshelves, her book tells the stories of interconnected families living in Hancox and nearby Sussex houses, a century or so of eccentricity, endeavour, love, adultery, disease, early death, political radicalism, brilliance, insanity and – a recurrent theme – ornithology.

For me, Hancox is the place that first shaped my feelings about architecture and set me on a career of studying, writing about and occasionally designing buildings. It is the essence of what is compelling about architecture, which is that it is the mineral intermediary between the lives of the people who make it and the lives of the people who inhabit it, who in turn make their own mark.

Hancox is also an example of the double role of buildings: they are both tools and symbols. A house shelters a family, but it also represents it. Sometimes, image and reality coincide and sometimes they don't. Sometimes, function defers to symbol – very much so in the case of the poorly plumbed, freezing cold, uncleanable, leaking-roofed Hancox. Charlotte's book is subtitled "A House and a Family", which says it all. Building and content are intertwined.

Hancox was very like a person, a surrogate for the grandparents who all died before I was born. It was impressive, wonderful, mysterious and also querulous and demanding. The baffling echelons of dead relatives would conflate with mythical figures and with the tissue of the house. I was convinced that a painting of St Jerome in his cave, with a skull, rasping a stone on his chest, was a portrait of my grandfather. We were inordinately proud of being Florence Nightingale's fourth cousin twice removed – that is, we carried 1/256th of her genes. Also that we were possibly descended from Olioll Ólum, the semi-mythical king of Munster, Ireland, in the 3rd century AD. (His name means "bare-ear", as the goddess Aine chewed his down to the cartilage while he was ravishing her.)

Previous inhabitants had left charming wall-paintings of dragons and waterfowl (that ornithological streak again). There was a monkey skeleton under a glass dome, a pickled snake, drawers full of pinned moths and blown eggs, and a stuffed barn owl shot by a poor-sighted relative in the belief that it was a pigeon. The old plaster in the bedrooms was mixed with the hair of Sussex cattle to bind it. Charlotte thought this was the hair of dead ancestors encased, as in an Edgar Allen Poe story, in the wall. An especially present ghost was Great-Uncle Gillachrist, killed at Ypres aged 20 in 1914, whose personal effects, sent back from the front, remained unpacked in the attic.

It was a house that didn't quite know what it was. When visitors praised it, my mother would deprecate: "It's just an overgrown farmhouse." It was big, big enough that I could for some years avoid going into an entire section of it, as I thought that yetis lived there. It was old, a combination of the 15th, 16th and 19th centuries, with a single, much-venerated pillar from the 13th century, probably taken from a house formerly on the site. But you couldn't call it a stately home or a manor house. It was too dishevelled for that.

Every front was different, and almost every window, which has given me a lasting suspicion of the systematic. The materials were hanging clay tiles, a bit of half-timbering, soft, old brick and harsh Victorian brick, and an ugly, grey cement render. Externally, the most impressive features were big and shapely Tudor chimneys. Inside, its greatest beauty was its wood: old panelling, polished floors, wonky, ancient chests, burnished tables, countless degrees of patina, reflection and roughness. Also its light. It had an amazing ability to accumulate shadows in its recesses, punctuated with filtered sunshine. The ascent from dark to light up the big stair is still one of my favourite pieces of architecture.

For a child, it was a place the imagination could inhabit. You could make spare rooms into made-up countries (and my brother Charles made his bedroom into the United Moore Republic, an autocracy with a male-only population). The rambling corridors and stairs were perfect for ambushes and shoot-outs with visiting cousins. You could speculate endlessly about the unknowable content of all the rooms, cabinets and garden.

At the top of a second, smaller stair was a wooden gate, installed to protect Victorian toddlers. I insisted on believing that, like various pieces of concrete in the surrounding coastal countryside, it was a defence against Nazi invaders.

There were costs. Photographs of the living were kept in a drawer in one of the vast, glass-fronted bookcases, as if we weren't as real as the gold-framed dead, and were less entitled to be there. The batteries of old books, too many for anyone to read in a lifetime, were intimidating. The wealth and weight of the past could be a burden as well as a wonder.

Hancox demanded a level of upkeep that was beyond most of the people who have lived there. My grandfather kept it together with the help of a legacy from his father's mistress. My parents, in the oil-shocked 1970s, didn't have the same assets. The neatly espaliered fruit trees in the kitchen garden grew hippie-haired, nettles and brambles sprouted, walls crumbled and from time to time a nice old drawing or manuscript would be auctioned in order to mend the roof.

It could be depressing, the impossibility of ever truly fixing the place up. It could strain the flesh-and-blood people struggling to serve this architectural person and exerted undue influence on their relationships. Hancox was rarely a completely comfortable fit for its inhabitants: the first member of the family to own it was a 20-year-old woman whose insane mother and heroic father had both died, as had both her brothers. It was a strange decision for her to take on this daunting property, but for her as for others subsequently the point seemed to be that it created an aura of stability and security, whether or not those things were really there.

Hancox is not a typical building, but it does what most architecture does. It proposes ways of living, makes restrictions and enables freedoms. It suggests, inspires and infuriates. It connects present with past and dwelling with landscape. You can never know for sure that it is worth its demands, but I am grateful that I lived there.

Hancox: A House and a Family by Charlotte Moore is published by Viking, £20

London SE5; London SE15

I'm told, by people who don't suffer from the radical unmusicality which is my personal affliction, that in music pauses are as important as the notes. Something similar is true of architecture. The bits that are not there matter as much as those that are, as if buildings are only completed by the people and actions they contain. You sometimes want the architecture to hold back. What makes bad design offensive is often the urge to fill every space with the decisions of the architect, to determine, finish and close down a place before it is inhabited.

The enlargement of the South London Gallery is a work with a lot of the not-there. It's often hard to tell where the new work starts and ends. There is no systematic set of details marching through the building. It cannot be summed up in a single memorable image, which possibly makes it look a little boring on the pages of a newspaper. It does not prescribe a single route through the complex, or a single way of occupying its spaces. It is more garden-like – a loosely assembled group of places.

The original South London Gallery, completed in 1891, is a work of late Victorian cultural philanthropy. Located between the humble districts of Peckham and Camberwell, its aim was to enrich the cultural lives of ordinary local people. It was open at weekends, unusual at a time when it was assumed that most people who visited galleries were from leisured, rather than working, classes.

The old gallery building is, essentially, a single fine room, top lit, rectangular and much liked by artists, with one of the biggest uninterrupted walls for the display of art in London. It  has no presence on the street outside, being tucked behind the ornate building that contains the Camberwell College of Arts. It relies for its impact on the imagination on the power of the exhibitions held there – Gilbert and George's Naked Shit Pictures of 1994 being one that lingers in the memory.

The purpose of the expansion is to provide an education space, a flat for artists in residence, a cafe, and rooms in which art can be shown in different ways to the single fine room. It occupies shards of space to the side of the existing gallery, and a plain greyish Victorian terraced house which, in a typically London juxtaposition, huddles against the flamboyant orange and white art school next door.

The architects are 6a, a practice led by Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald. 6a value subtlety over spectacle, and for them quality of thought and the way a project is made are more important than the creation of an impressive style or image. Older exponents of this attitude include Tony Fretton and, on his less monumental days, David Chipperfield. In their nine-year-long career, 6a have stood out for a particular lightness of touch and playfulness of detail.

At the South London Gallery they chose not to demolish the Victorian house, which was derelict when they started the job. Instead, they kept and selectively exposed pieces of its brick shell, and its rickety carpentry. Shiny new things are put alongside crumbly old things, as well as elements, like handrails and balustrades, that require a second glance to see if they are new or old. Some materials are new, some reused. The artists' flat is put on the top, a cafe in the ex-living room on the ground floor.

Then, to the rear, a tall square "garden room" is created, with sharply cut windows that give edited views of greenery beyond. Next comes a narrow garden with a winding path, followed by an education room lit from above, whose huge pivoting doors can turn it from a protected box into something at one with the outside. Most of the materials are deliberately basic – "You could get most of this at Travis Perkins," says Emerson – except for a few details, like some elegant brass door handles of 1920s Hungarian design.

The totality is a gentle, wandering assembly of domestic and institutional spaces where it is never quite clear where gallery starts and house ends. It allows and awaits interpretation by the artists who will use it. It suggests, but it doesn't prescribe. At times, the cramped proportions of the Victorian house seem too influential on the whole work, but as a pendant to the spacious original gallery its smallness makes sense.

Meanwhile, perched above the churning mud and trucks of London's Olympic site, another young practice has created a more flamboyant structure. This is Studio East Dining, a restaurant designed to last three weeks. It is perched on top of what will be a car park in the immense Westfield Stratford City shopping development, which is due to open in 2011. It is a creation of Bistrotheque, the east London company that pioneered the idea of "pop-up" – ie temporary – restaurants. The pavilion is designed by Carmody Groarke, the young architects best known for their 7/7 memorial in Hyde Park. Its plan is a starburst, a set of radiating and expanding boxes, whose ceilings slope up towards views of the monuments of turn-of-the-millennium London. One frames the Olympic stadium, currently as beautiful as it will ever be, as its spare steel frame is not yet engulfed in the happy-clappy cladding it is due to receive. There's also Zaha Hadid's Aquatic Centre, and more distant views of Canary Wharf and the Gherkin.

The aim was to exploit the views while also creating the inwardness and intimacy that are essential to dining. Unlike the revolving restaurants on flash 1970s hotels, the view does not usurp eating and conversation: instead, the form creates a strong sense of enclosure intensified by the vastness outside, like a cabin on an ocean liner.

The structure is mostly made of things already on the Westfield site. Its frame is scaffolding, with a lining of rough boards that play the role of oak panelling in posh restaurants. Plastic, of a kind used to shrink-wrap steel when it arrives on construction sites, keeps the rain out. Details are not prissy – indeed, the plastic is distinctly botched in places – but perfection is not the point.

What the gallery and the restaurant have in common is a spirit of adaptation and of making use of what is at hand. Also, the sense of being a setting for something – whether art or dining – which the architecture heightens but does not dominate. Neither is passive or dull, but both will become better as they are put to the use for which they were intended. Both show more wit and delight than can be found in most of the billions of pounds of construction that spread below the Studio East pavilion.

Reservations: see studioeastdining.com

This new show is 'a mysterious dwelling infused with subjectivity and desire' featuring artists such as Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti and René Magritte

A grand Palladian villa is reborn in west London, while at the V&A, a Japanese master is celebrating altogether humbler dwellings

This week, I present to you a whitish building, mostly rectangular, made with large pieces of glass and some nice stone. This may not seem very exciting, especially as works of this description have been the default setting of tasteful British architecture for 20 years. The recent shortlist for designing the relocated Design Museum was made up of purveyors of whitish rectangularity and nice stone, including the winner of the commission, John Pawson. If Inuit are said to have 26 different words for snow, an architecture critic sometimes needs 26 words for off-white.

But this building is designed by architects with a rare sense of those things – relationships, scale, details, nuance, light, matter and pitch – that make a place. It is also in a location, the gardens of Chiswick House in west London, that the chief executive of English Heritage, Simon Thurley, calls "incredibly important" and compares to Stonehenge. Chiswick House helped to change the world or, at any rate, the world of gardens. Created from the 1720s to the 1740s by the wealthy Lord Burlington and his protege, William Kent, it led the way in breaking with the formal geometries of baroque gardens and replacing them with asymmetric and informal patterns that mimicked and followed the shapes of nature. Kent, as Horace Walpole said, "leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden". After him came the landscape gardens of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton and, ultimately, every hillock and winding path, and every picturesque gazebo and rockery in suburban gardens everywhere, can claim descent.

The centrepiece of the garden is Chiswick Villa, a domed and porticoed party pavilion created by Burlington and Kent in approximate imitation of Palladio's Villa Rotonda near Vicenza, helping to establish the Palladian style in England. It is hard to think of a more influential work in British architecture and landscape, yet it has been treated negligently for a century or so. The villa has been an asylum for posh lunatics and a fire station, with trucks parked outside. The 17th-century house to which the villa was attached was demolished, to save on maintenance costs.

There was once a risk that the gardens would be submerged under speculative semi-detacheds, but they became a municipal park. This opening up of aristocratic territory is nicely democratic, but it also contributed to the erosion of its original design. Like most British parks, it has suffered since Margaret Thatcher's government decided that spending on open spaces was not a statutory obligation on local authorities. According to Thurley, the gardens became "a big dog lavatory, and a set of targets for youths with spray cans".

Part of the problem was that the villa was the responsibility of English Heritage and the gardens of the London borough of Hounslow, a contradiction of the fact that the "whole point of Chiswick is that the house and gardens were a single entity". A trust has therefore been set up, with the task of managing both together. This has to sustain itself in part through income from events and parties, though £12m from the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage and private donors and sponsors has gone into restoring the gardens and building a new cafe.

The restoration, led by English Heritage, has been a matter of cleaning up, decluttering and unclogging the gardens, as well as restoring its temples and follies. Inopportune fences have been removed and a jumble of different seats and litter bins has been simplified. The sweep from the villa down to an artificial lake has been returned to its original openness and previously blocked vistas have been restored. It is simple, not glamorous, but essential stuff. Later extensions, including a patterned, 19th-century "Italian garden" and a magnificent hothouse, have also been restored.

Then there is the whitish, squarish, nice stone building. This is the cafe, an essential part of the trust's business plan, built at a cost of £1.4m to the designs of the architects Caruso St John, who are leading lights of the generation after Zaha Hadid and the David Chipperfield. It is carefully located, off to one side of the villa, like a fragmentary echo of the wings that Palladio added to his houses. Its position is considered, in the English landscape tradition, in relation to surrounding trees, to the position of the sun and to the outdoor spaces that form around it.

The cafe's style is simplified classical, but with nuances and twists. Its pillars are precisely cut but are of a pitted and pocked Portland stone that resembles the rustic stuff of grottoes. They make high, deep arcades, because, says the architect Peter St John, "the nicest al fresco lunches are in arcades in Spain and Italy". The arcades also allow different kinds of use in different seasons – they can be more or less occupied depending on the weather.

If the original villa was a place for sophisticated townies to party in a contrived version of nature, the cafe is also urbane. Its proportions are more elevated than a typical park cafe, the lamp shades have a surprising mirrored finish. The pillars of the arcade are out of synch with the verticals in the inner wall, which creates unexpected shifts in the interior experience. Sometimes, you feel thoroughly enclosed, sometimes almost at one with the green outside. It nicely captures the best of the spirit of Kent and Burlington: the idea that you adapt, modify and tune the nature that you find, rather than subjugate it.

Terunobu Fujimori's Beetle's House

Meanwhile, at the V&A, you will be able to see a different take on building and nature. This is an installation by Terunobu Fujimori, a Japanese historian who, in his 40s, turned his hand to designing buildings. It is part of the V&A's 1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces exhibition, in which structures by seven architects are dotted around the London museum.

Fujimori's favourite material is charred wood, a traditional material in Japan, which, if the scorching is done correctly, has properties of endurance and weather-resistance. In a memorable exhibit at the Venice Architecture Biennale, visitors had to enter, stooping, through small, square holes in a blackened screen, the holes being framed in gold leaf. He also likes mud, thatch and wonky tree trunks.

When I meet Fujimori in the south London workshop where his V&A structure was made, the atmosphere is thick with smoke and flecks of ash fall on hair and skin. A rough-hewn stump is being prepared as the base of a little hut to be installed in the museum. Students are doing the scorching and the sticking together – he likes non-professional builders, plus himself, to build his works. Some are stapling bits of charcoal on to ceiling panels to form a decorative pattern. This is not very craftsmanly but Fujimori says that's the point: high degrees of technique would be excluding. Anyone can put up his buildings.

He centres all his structures around a living fire, saying that the origin of building lay in the need to shelter a flame. He also happily admits that his designs, with all their carbonising and burning, are nothing to do with sustainability. They are personal images of the primitive and he does not seem concerned whether anyone else derives satisfaction from them.

My feelings for his work vary between an attraction to his tactile materials and a reaction against the Hobbity quaintness of some of the finished products. Also disappointment in the way he builds – engaging non-experts is all very well, but there's nothing very life-enhancing about chomping at charcoal with staplers.