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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

Conservation architect who specialised in English cathedrals

Corinne Bennett, who has died aged 75, devoted her long career to repairing many of Britain's best-loved buildings and to promoting the profession of conservation architect. She became the first woman to be appointed consultant architect to an English cathedral when, in 1974, she took on responsibility for the restoration of Winchester Cathedral.

Corinne oversaw a 15-year programme of works at Winchester, including the repair and releading of the roof, and the restoration of much of the stonework in the eastern half of the cathedral. The misericords in the choir stalls were restored and a programme of lighting was implemented, combining the romance of candles with discrete artificial light for the choirboys to read their scores. She became a popular local figure whose roof tours of the cathedral were legendary, thanks to her inspiration, her depth of knowledge and her verve. She was always wonderfully collaborative in her work and sure of herself without ever being overbearing.

Born Corinne Wilson, she spent much of her early life in Montreal. Her mother, Lucile, was French Canadian. Her Cumbrian-born father, Gilbert, was professor of geology at Imperial College London and inspired her love of building stone. On her return to Britain in 1944, she went to school at the Sacred Heart convent in Hove, East Sussex, and by the age of 12 was intent on a career in conserving old buildings. An arrangement was made for a male tutor to enter the convent to give her drawing lessons, and Corinne prepared to become an architect. She entered the Bartlett School at the University of London in 1952 and qualified in 1957. She then worked for the avant-garde architects Powell & Moya.

Corinne turned to historic building work, first with the London county council and then, in 1963, with the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, which later became English Heritage. The conservation movement was emerging, and she was at the vanguard of new principles and techniques. She undertook pioneering studies in stone preservation and cleaning with the Building Research Establishment, near Watford, Hertfordshire, and applied these techniques at the Tower of London, Audley End House in Essex, the Jewel Tower at Westminster and Bolsover Castle. She was always at home in a quarry or discussing stone and carving with masons.

In 1968 Corinne was invited to join the London office of the architects Purcell Miller Tritton. There she had her first experience of repairing a cathedral, Ely, under Donovan Purcell, surveyor to the fabric, who became an important mentor. Corinne was made a senior partner of the practice and opened its office at Sevenoaks in Kent, where she was appointed consulting surveyor to the diocese of Rochester. Her repairs to Kent churches led to her being made an MBE in 1988.

She also worked on many National Trust properties nearby, including Chiddingstone, and Alfriston Clergy House in East Sussex. It was in Sevenoaks that Corinne met Keith Bennett, also a conservation architect. They married in 1979.

In 1980 she became consultant architect for repairs and alterations at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. In 1989 she produced a report on the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, London, which needed challenging repairs to its iron and mosaics. Among the buildings under her care in the 1980s were Wilton House in Wiltshire, Charleston Farmhouse and Cowdray House in Sussex, and Ealing Abbey, along with further work for the National Trust across southern England.

She was appointed to the Roman Catholic Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem in 1979 and rose to become a dame commander. She continued to champion conservation, and to pass on her vast knowledge, as co-founder of the Hampshire and the Islands Historic Churches Trust in 1989. In 1991 she postponed her retirement to return to what was now English Heritage, becoming its first cathedrals architect. Her deep Catholic faith, and understanding of its liturgy, was particularly valuable in her re-ordering of the English College in Rome and St John's Seminary in Wonersh, Surrey. In 1996 Corinne became English Heritage's representative on the Church of England's Cathedral Fabric Commission, a post she held until 2006. She was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1997.

Corinne and Keith restored the Victorian rectory at Michelmersh, near Romsey, Hampshire, to make it their home. She is survivied by Keith and her brother, David.

• Corinne Marie Gillian Bennett, conservation architect, born 3 March 1935; died 10 July 2010

It is the world's first skyscraper with built-in wind turbines. But is London's Strata a green gimmick – or the future? Jonathan Glancey takes to the skies

I am standing on the wind-buffeted tip of the Strata tower, looking out through the blades of what appear to be an enormous propeller, at the London skyline and the green basin beyond. St Paul's cathedral, across the river, seems close enough to touch. It's the kind of view, and the kind of heroically stylised building, you would expect to see in some 1930s sci-fi movie: the perfect place for a hero and a villain to have a rooftop showdown.

At 147 metres, the newly opened Strata is London's tallest residential building. The nine-metre blades I'm standing beneath are housed in one of three wind turbines that crown this new tower soaring above Elephant and Castle, an area of the city not known for flashy penthouses. But Elephant and Castle is undergoing a massive, if slow, transition from a rundown miasma of noisy road intersections, underpasses and vast housing estates into what the Borough of Southwark hopes will be a £1.5bn model of inner-city regeneration.

The plan was first made public six years ago and work is unlikely to be completed before 2020. It's a colossal challenge, as well as an opportunity, and the £113.5m Strata, the first of three skyscrapers planned for here, is a symbol of the dynamism and energy the project demands. And that energy must, of course, be seen to be green. It's early days, but if the turbines work as planned, and aren't too noisy for residents in the pricey penthouses beneath them, they should generate 8% of this 43-storey building's energy needs. This is roughly enough to run its electrical and mechanical services (including three express lifts and automated window-cleaning rigs) as well as the lighting, heating and ventilation of its public spaces, which include an underground car and cycle park.

Strata is the first building in the world to incorporate wind turbines into its structure. Yes, the new Bahrain World Trade Centre in Manama, by the firm Atkins, also boasts three giant turbines, but these are set on steel struts connecting its twin towers, not part of the actual towers themselves. While I can vouch for the strength of the south-westerlies that will turn Strata's blades, whether its turbines will set a precedent for future British towers is less clear: this rooftop was exceedingly hard to construct, almost prohibitively so, every part of it having to be hauled up.

However, what the three fans do, without a doubt, is give Strata a striking profile. Whether you find this exciting, disturbing or simply over-the-top will be down to personal taste, yet it's no surprise the tower has been dubbed the Electric Razor, not just because of its whirling blades but also because of its black and silver lines that seem to pixellate upwards; Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, has called it the Lipstick.

So what do green experts think? "You've got to take your hat off to the design team for delivering a building that captures the imagination," says Paul King, head of the UK Green Building Council. "I doubt wind power will become a common feature in high-rise inner city projects, but without this type of bold innovation, how would we ever know? Developments like this show that sustainability is increasingly becoming mainstream. That's something everyone should celebrate."

Including the 1,000 or so people who have already moved into – or bought into – Strata's 408 flats (each boasting floor-to-ceiling windows). And there is a difference between the two. Nearly every flat was bought off-plan, before construction began, 50-75% of them by investors. This is a shame: the whole idea of the tower is that it should be a guiding light for new inner-city residential development. This is meant to be a home for local people, not a machine for property market profiteering.

Indeed, 25% of the flats, on floors two to 10, are "affordable homes", for those on incomes of less than £60,000 (in central London that kind of money won't guarantee a home of your own); meanwhile, a three-floor pavilion to the side of the tower has been given to council residents leaving the soon-to-be-demolished Aylesbury Estate, a 1960s housing complex seen by most as an enormous failure. Tony Blair made his first speech as prime minister at this estate, in a bid to show his government would care for the poorest elements in society.

To my mind, Strata's big propellers give the building the feel of an airship holding aloft the passenger cabins (or flats) below. Or perhaps it's more like an old-fashioned transatlantic liner with its complement of first-, second-and third-class passengers. I think of this as architect Ian Bogle, of London-based BFLS (formerly Hamiltons Architects), leads me through the tall, narrow lobby to the lifts that shoot silently up to the residential floors.

'You feel like you own the city'

The views are spectacular. Most front doors open directly onto gaping vistas of London, framed by giant windows. They are not for the faint-hearted. Bogle goes to open what looks like a door at the side of a window and I think he might vanish into the ether. As it happens, he's simply opening a perforated screen designed to let fresh air in. "We've tried to get as much daylight and fresh air as possible into the flats," says Bogle. "You certainly feel as if you own the entire city from up here."

Indeed you do. There are magic moments, too: way below, trains race in and out of buildings and seem to pass through the tower itself. It reminds me of the super-modern city drawn by Antonio Sant'Elia, the Italian futurist architect, shortly before the first world war. His Città Nuova was a dynamic, machine-like metropolis through which cars and even aircraft would pass, via openings in the buildings. His imaginings inspired film-makers, from William Cameron Menzie's Things to Come in 1936, to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner in 1982; they also resonated in city developments as dramatic and diverse as the Barbican, the Pompidou and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. And they echo today in these views from the Strata tower, and in its mighty turbines.

But are they just a tokenistic green gimmick? Or will they propel us towards a new urban architecture, one that's cinematically thrilling and ecologically sound? Until its sibling towers rise and the redevelopment of Elephant and Castle is complete, it will be hard to properly judge Strata. Right now, it stands alone, a sleek silver sentinel, towering over the follies of the recent past.

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.

Bellegarde station is the prototype for a key French Rail project aiming to put stations back at the heart of communities

With a transparent dome made of plastic tubing, the circular building that welcomes travellers arriving in Bellegarde, in the foothills of the French Alps, resembles a moon base rather than a railway station. Combining advanced technology and bioclimatic architecture, the national rail operator SNCF's most recent creation reflects the publicly owned company's determination to boost the environmental awareness of its buildings and make its stations an emblematic feature of tomorrow's sustainable cities.

"Bellegarde is a prototype for what we plan to do with our biggest stations. Thermal and environmental performance are at the top of our list of target specifications," says Sophie Boissard, who heads Stations and Connections, the business unit set up by SNCF a year ago to operate and capitalise on its 3,000 stations.

Substantially larger than Bellegarde, the new TGV high-speed stations further north at Besançon and Belfort will go even further along the same lines, deploying solar panels, Canadian wells, geothermal energy and a hi-tech bioclimatic hothouse. Nor will this policy only affect new stations. The rail operator intends to enlarge and refurbish at least 100 destinations over the next 10 years, investing some $6bn.

One priority is to improve conditions in buildings that tend to be freezing in winter and baking hot in summer. But there is no question of turning them into air-conditioned coolers all year round. "It isn't financially possible for us and it makes no sense in environmental terms," says Boissard.

Etienne Tricaud, the deputy-head of Arep, SNCF's design subsidiary, says: "What is at stake here is making travellers comfortable without it costing the earth." This is where the bioclimatic systems experimented with at Bellegarde will come into play. The dome is made of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), a tough, lightweight polymer derived from Teflon, which is cost-effective and recyclable. It forms a hothouse above the wooden cupola that covers the station. In winter, low-speed fans pump hot air from this cavity into the hall below, maintaining a temperature of 16°C without consuming additional energy. In summer the hothouse produces a chimney effect, drawing off the heat which is replaced by cool air at 10°C rising from a Provençal (or Canadian) well. "This system alone results in 40% energy savings," says Tricaud.

Such "ecologically correct" comfort is all the more important because, according to SNCF's long-term strategy, tomorrow's stations should become "a pivotal point in the sustainable town". On top of being hubs for all forms of public and private transport (main and regional rail links, trams, buses, cars, bicycles), they are set to become mini-town centres, combining offices, business centres and shops, healthcare, childminding and collection services.

"This is definitely the model I want to promote: it is a response to the need for greater density, multiple functions and easy mobility," says Boissard, adding: "This approach makes sense, particularly for our 40 regional [mainline] stations."

Another advantage of such diversification is that it is highly profitable, contributing to the modernisation of railway infrastructure. Without the 10,000 square metres of retail space grafted on to the original project, it would have been difficult to find the means to renovate Gare St Lazare in Paris, due for completion next year. In many towns, the area round the railway station, long abandoned by all but sex shops and shady hotels, is now the focus of a new urban and economic dynamic. "The decline of stations and surrounding neighbourhood was due to the dominance of private cars. The drive to bring business back into town centres and the resulting upturn has reversed this trend," says Boissard.

A similar pattern is apparent elsewhere. In Japan, where transit operators are also property developers, stations are an essential component of town centres, uniting retail and business services. And in Switzerland the federal rail operator SBB decides which businesses can be located near stations to achieve the right urban mix.

This article originally appeared in Le Monde

Architect, designer, historian, teacher and dedicated defender of the environment

Dennis Sharp, who has died aged 76, was well-known as an architectural historian, teacher and active defender of the environment. However, his reputation in those fields rather overshadowed his considerable success as a working architect and his long-term commitment to environmentally friendly building.

Much of his work involved the renovation of historic – particularly 20th-century – buildings, on which Dennis was a recognised authority, and included Norman Foster's Renault Distribution Centre in Swindon, Wiltshire. But Dennis was passionate about environmental problems as well, and he was particularly proud of Strawdance studio, the smallest and cheapest national lottery-funded project to date, which seemed a miniature sum of his many concerns. It was built in Hertfordshire in 1999 at a cost of not much more than £5,000, of rough timber and clear plastic, its walls made up from bales of the straw for which a neighbouring meadow had been mowed.

Born in Bedford, he went to Bedford Modern school, where he stood out as an excellent draughtsman. At Luton Art School, he studied drawing and painting, which turned out to be a formative experience. His father, Henry, who was a builder, had other ideas, and persuaded the architect Albert Richardson (later Sir Albert) for whom he had built some houses in nearby Flitwick, to accept the teenaged Dennis as an articled pupil.

He committed himself to architecture when, at 21, he moved to the Architectural Association School in London, with which he was to be connected throughout his career, eventually becoming its vice-president (as he would later be of the Royal Institute of British Architects, between 1991 and 1993). On graduating, he moved to a postgraduate stint at Liverpool University where he met Joanna Scales, a drama student, whom he married in 1964; their daughter, Melanie, was born two years later.

Dennis's first engagement was for the Civic Trust of the North-West, in Manchester; he taught at the university at the same time, until he was called back to the AA in 1968 to take over the teaching of history from Sir John Summerson. By then, Dennis had already edited and published a festschrift, Planning and Architecture (1967), for his teacher and much older colleague, Arthur Korn, who had been a heroic figure in the first years of modern architecture in Berlin.

While teaching at the AA, Dennis produced its quarterly journal, which published some of the more thoughtful contributions to the architectural debate during the 15 years of its existence. He also worked on the translation and editing of a monumental but neglected masterpiece, Hermann Muthesius's three-volume account of The English House, which appeared in 1979 and has recently been reissued – it had originally been published in Berlin in 1904-05. Such activities did not distract him from teaching, however, and it was a real vocation for him, as the many students who remained in touch with him can testify.

By the time he returned to the AA, Dennis had also established himself as chronicler of the much undervalued aspects of 20th-century building. His Modern Architecture and Expressionism (1966) situated neglected but crucial figures such as Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut and Hans Poelzig (but also more marginal ones – Hermann Finsterlin notably) in the mainstream of 20th-century architecture, and this led to a re-examination of the more conventionally "rationalist" accounts of the Modern Movement.

All this made Dennis sympathetic to those architects who developed an expressive formal language while exploring new structural techniques, notably the Japanese Kisho Kurokawa and, more importantly, the Swiss-Spanish Santiago Calatrava, on whom Dennis wrote an authoritative monograph and with whom he occasionally collaborated. He was a generous supporter of others he thought neglected, including the Roman Manfredi Nicoletti and the Maltese Richard England.

Recent years were devoted to reviving the reputation of the brilliant 1930s architects Amyas Connell, Colin Lucas and Basil Ward, who were perhaps the most radical rationalists working in Britain. His book about them, Connell, Ward and Lucas (1994), will remain the classic account of their achievement. He was therefore deeply involved in the English Heritage effort to save one of their best private houses, Greenside, in Surrey, whose demolition in 2003 by its defiant owner resulted in an exemplary punitive fine. It was part of a much wider campaign to give the best work of Modern Movement architects the same recognition as was accorded to the "monuments" of previous centuries.

Dennis almost inevitably became an active member of the quaintly acronymed Docomomo (Documentation and Conservation of the Modern Movement), now a powerful international body, of which he co-chaired the British branch; and he was a founder member of the International Committee of Architectural Critics (CICA) of which he became the chairman in 1993. CICA was established as a wing of the International Union of Architects to provide a code of conduct and protect critics assailed by the criticised. Dennis himself became a prolific chronicler, often acerbic in his comments, of the architecture of his own time, all the while maintaining a stream of scholarly publications – books and articles – dealing mostly with late-19th and 20th-century architecture.

As a working designer, he had set up a first studio in St Albans, Hertfordshire, in 1969. His marriage to Joanna ended in divorce, and in 1983 he remarried, to Yasmin Shariff. She had left Nairobi, Kenya, in 1975 to study at the Architectural Association, the Bartlett School of Architecture and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before joining Dennis Sharp Architects as a partner in 1992. Their son, Deen, was born the following year and they moved to Epping, in Essex, where they worked as a design partnership until Dennis's death.

He is survived by Yasmin, Deen and Melanie.

• Dennis Charles Sharp, architect, writer and historian, born 30 November 1933; died 6 May 2010

Commission for Sustainable London 2012 calls for transfer of low-carbon lessons from Olympics to the wider UK industry

Organisers of the London 2012 Olympics risk missing a golden opportunity to inspire a step change towards a low-carbon economy, the green watchdog for the games has warned.

The Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 released its annual review on how the games' sustainable vision is taking shape. The UK's green promises were key reasons why Seb Coe and his team won the bid in Singapore in 2005.

Although the report said that the Olympic Delivery Authority, which has responsibility for construction and design of the venues and infrastructure, had maintained a high standard of sustainable design, the benefits to the UK's wider green economy could be lost before the games even begin unless "the knowledge in people's heads is captured before they leave".

With just over two years to go until the games begin, planning has now reached a critical stage as the ODA scales back in anticipation of the completion of venues next year.

The Local Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, responsible for running the event, will take on an increasingly greater role in delivering the sustainable targets for London 2012.

The report, Raising the Bar, says: "Our main area of concern lies in the wider commitments that were made during the bid or just afterwards. Broad promises have been made in official documents: 'to make the Olympic Park a blueprint for sustainable living' and 'to be a catalyst for new waste management infrastructure in east London'.

"With the exception of a few worthy initiatives, there is no comprehensive plan to make this happen. Furthermore, it is not clear what definitions lie behind these expressions or who is responsible for making them happen.

"With just over two years to go before the 'inspirational power of the Games' moves to Rio, never to return to London, these issues need to be resolved."

Shaun McCarthy, head of the commission, said: "Having an Olympics is an inherently unsustainable thing to do. To build all this stuff to watch some people run around – what's sustainable about that?

"We have to ask ourselves is it good enough just to have some great sustainable venues and put on a sustainable games which we are increasingly confident about, or will the Olympics really make a difference?

"Is this going to be something in isolation so we have one great big sustainable Olympics and then go back to business as usual?

"Or will the games actually change things? Because that was the promise that was made when we won the bid.

"A lot of carbon has been saved by comparison with business as usual construction techniques. If we can transfer that knowledge to the wider industry, we can save a lot more carbon than will be emitted in the whole of the Olympic Games.

"How can we use the magic of the Olympic Games to make that happen?"

McCarthy cited lower-carbon cement, low-toxin plastics and a zero landfill waste target as some of the achievements so far.

The stadium is the lightest Olympic stadium, using a quarter of the concrete used for the Beijing games, and features a lighting system suspended from a compression wheel made from re-purposed gas pipes left over from a different construction project.

McCarthy singled out the velodrome as an especially good example of sustainable design, with its ultra-lightweight roof and natural lighting and ventilation.

But he admitted that results have been mixed on the Olympic park. Zaha Hadid's feted aquatic centre, with a roof made from 3,000 tonnes of steel, was a "sharp lesson" in sustainable construction.

"That is a lot of steel just to cover a swimming pool and it is not necessary to have that much," McCarthy said, adding that the architect had simply been asked to design "a beautiful building" before the bid gained momentum.

But he said he was "very disappointed" that the energy centre in the Olympic park would run on gas, not biogas from onsite waste.

He also said he had concerns about London mayor Boris Johnson's approval of the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in the park.

"It's very early days for the Orbit tower. Yes, I am concerned that it is a lot of steel. We are asking the Greater London Authority questions about it but we haven't yet had a satisfactory response.

"We would expect the mayor's office and the GLA to work to at least the same high standards of sustainability as the ODA."

An ODA spokesperson said: "We welcome the scrutiny of the commission and will continue to work with them to address any concerns they may have.

"The report states that the commission is pleased with our progress and they believe we are on track to meet challenging and extensive sustainability targets that have never been achieved before on a project of this size and scale.

"Our sustainability strategy was embedded into our processes at the start of the project and is already being delivered onsite.

"We are currently pulling together the best practice and lessons that have been learnt from the project so that they can be used by the industry for future projects."

Salford University staff to simulate life in terraced two-up, two-down in effort to make UK's housing stock greener

Energy-efficiency scientists are to study how people live by rebuilding an entire, redbrick Manchester terraced house inside a university laboratory's sealed testing chamber.

The two-up, two-down dwelling is identical to those portrayed in Coronation Street, television's oldest surviving soap, and to more than two million real-life homes.

It will be used for power-saving experiments in simulated climates featuring high winds, snow and Manchester's notorious rain.

The pre-first world war house is to be salvaged from a nearby demolition scheme. It will be dismantled within the next fortnight and rebuilt in the Energy Hub at Salford University.

Gas, water and electricity will be piped in and furniture installed, with staff from 13 academic departments taking turns to play the part of residents.

Life in this "Energy House" will be as busy as in any of the terraces which sprang up across the North of England to house those working in mines and mills, but focused on entirely modern concepts such as carbon-reduction equipment and smart-meter tests.

Psychologists will join engineers in a series of experiments to see if particular wall or carpet colours make people feel warmer and reduce the demand for heat. Home energy use accounts for 30% of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions.

"It's a house from the past, working for the future," said Dr Nigel Mellors, associate dean of science, engineering and technology at Salford and one of the team running a project aimed to last 20 years or more.

"But this one is only the beginning'" he said. "We reckon we'll know everything we need to about how to improve a terrace like this after about three years. Then we'll knock it down and build something different. Perhaps a typical 1960s house, to see how that can be improved."

The project is designed to parallel work on new-build energy-saving homes, recognising that many housebuyers prefer older properties for other reasons.

Dave Ritter, sustainability director at BDP architects, who are also involved with the scheme, said the sheer number of surviving terraces was proof of their appeal.

"They are in many ways an extremely successful design, with a particularly good sense of community and neighbourly links," he said.

"They are on a nice scale and sensibly laid-out inside. But energy-saving was not an issue at the time they were built, and this project is an imaginative and very practical way of putting that right."

Remodelled terraces have already proved a success in the Lancashire Pennine towns of Nelson and Colne and also in Salford, notably at Chimney Pot Park where the developers Urban Splash have "upended" the old model, giving 19th century terraces sleeping quarters downstairs and living rooms on the first floor.

Leeds has found a huge market as starter homes for its 40,000-plus back-to-back terraces, once condemned as slums for having inadequate ventilation but now, with three of their four walls comfortably sandwiched by other homes, praised for saving heat and economical use of space.

Green variations also include some Northern towns' policy of "alternate demolition", where the clearing of every other row of barrack-like terraces has doubled the gardens and open space of those left.

Larger scale demolition of traditional terraces by government housing renewal projects has caused anger in Liverpool, Manchester and Lancashire's former milltowns.

Professor Steve Donnelly from Salford's faculty of science said terraced houses had won their case for reprieve but now needed "ways of being more efficient, as they are going to house people for generations to come. That requires detailed and robust research, which the Energy House will provide".

Tony Juniper, former director of Friends of the Earth, said: "Domestic energy use accounts for a huge proportion of emissions which we have to reduce. The millions of real-life terrace houses like this one are going to play an important part."

John Alker, policy director at the UK Green Building Council, said: "This looks like a great piece of research and it will be particularly interesting to see the results on behaviour, where less has been done to date.

"But let's not forget that there is a hell of lot that we know already – the biggest barrier to low carbon home refurbishment going mainstream has tended to be the upfront cost to consumers, and that is set to be tackled by the Energy Bill in the form of 'Pay As You Save schemes'."

Rem Koolhaas has helped come up with a daring plan to run Europe on a grid of shared renewable energy – and redraw the map of the continent at the same time

I well remember my interview for a place at architecture school. As a kindly tutor leafed through my cobbled-together portfolio, on the wall I noticed a photo of a trapezoidal cabin with a whirly helical thing on top. It was, I was told, a prototype of an energy-efficient house, a concept of which I was then only dimly conscious.

That was more decades ago than I care to think, and it goes to show that green architecture is nothing new. It goes to the heart of the paradox most architects face: they tend to be hopeful, liberal types who want to change things for the better, but construction requires money and power, which are not always in the hands of the nicest people. So nice architects find themselves working for not-nice clients. Similarly with environmental matters: buildings gobble energy and resources in their construction and use, so the most ecological thing might be not to build them at all, but that would put architects out of work. So they are drawn to that conscience-salving potential oxymoron, the green building.

Just as what was once called health food has gone from muddy lentils to crisp Ottolenghi sophistication, so green architecture has been through many phases. For a while, it wore its ecology on its sleeve, sticking conspicuous turbines and ventilators on roofs, as in the large bronze chimneys over Portcullis House, the MPs' office building next to Big Ben. Now it tends to be a more technical matter, governed by the calculations of the engineering consultancies that have grown up to make buildings sustainable.

There has also been a shift in scale since my tutor's cabin. Now architects design green cities, such as Dongtan in China, or Foster and Partners' $22bn Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, which is currently on show at the Sustainable Futures exhibition at the Design Museum. But none have gone as far as the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the practice created by Rem Koolhaas. It is proposing to redesign an entire continent – ours, Europe – along energy-saving lines. In fact, they would like to include North Africa as well. As Reinier de Graaf, the partner in charge of the proposal, says: "Megalomania is a standard part of our repertoire."

Called Roadmap 2050, it is a plan calculated to make the Ukip-ians of this world bubble and froth with rage, as it combines the belief that drastic intervention is required to mitigate climate change, with a desire to give meaning and power to the European Union. It has been commissioned by the European Climate Foundation, a philanthropic body dedicated to promoting policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it aims to show how the EU can achieve an incredible-seeming target of an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. The proposal is being considered by the EU Council of Ministers, for their possible endorsement.

The proposal's starting point is the fact that renewable energy sources such as wind and sunshine are erratic and unreliable, which means they have to be supported by other forms of power. But they are also available in different quantities in different places – wind is abundant in Britain, sun in Spain – and in different seasons. The big idea is to create a power network across the continent linking all these sources, which could then compensate for each other. If it was windless in Britain but sunny in Spain, power could travel from them to us, and vice versa.

This is a political, as well as a technical proposal. "You can use this project to create integration. It creates a very pragmatic reason to integrate," says De Graaf. It coincides with work the OMA has been doing for several years on the ways that the European Union represents itself, through their design and research subsidiary AMO, which "operates in areas beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture". Koolhaas is a member of the EU's Reflection Group, whose job is to think about what might happen a decade or two hence.

With a cheeky, provocative tone typical of OMA, they even show a map of Europe redrawn as "Eneropa", with regions defined by their energy source. Ireland and the western half of Britain become the "tidal states", while the eastern half forms part of the "isles of wind". Former Yugoslavia is miraculously reunited as "Biomassburg". Most of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece become "Solaria". OMA shows images of these places, like postcards from the future, with batteries of turbines, or plumes of geothermal steam.

OMA insists that its plan makes sense, even if you exclude climate issues. It has produced figures to show that the scheme would not cost all that much per head, especially when compared with road-building, war in Iraq, or bailing out bankers. They point out the benefit of reducing reliance on Middle Eastern oil and Russian gas. They argue that the economic benefits would outweigh the costs. They say that a reduction of even more than 80% could be achieved if North Africa, with all its sunshine, could be included in the grid. Their plan, they say, is "not rooted in apocalyptic hysteria", but is eminently practical.

It's a seductive proposition: go green and get richer. It is also refreshing and unusual to hear architects proposing environmental strategies that do not require the future commissioning of architects to design buildings. It also raises an obvious question: what on earth qualifies architects who spend most of their time designing museums or office buildings or Prada stores to pronounce on these subjects? This is partly answered by the fact that OMA is not acting alone, but is part of a team that includes management consultants McKinsey, energy consultants Kema and Imperial College London. But OMA still takes responsibility for the "overarching vision".

The other question is whether to believe them. OMA has over the years shown me new cities on islands off Korea, the transposition of Amsterdam Schiphol airport into the North Sea, and the redesign of the European flag of gold stars on blue into a multicoloured barcode derived from the flags of its different nations. So far all these ideas have remained on paper. Is there any reason to think the Roadmap would be different?

It is plain that their plan would need will and cohesion that has not been evident in, for example, the EU's attempts to solve the Greek debt crisis. Reinier de Graaf cites as a model President Kennedy's declaration that, before the 1960s were out, America would put men on the moon, but Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Union, is no Jack Kennedy. However, De Graaf argues that European countries cooperate better at a practical level than an ideological one. He also stresses that the Roadmap "doesn't require member states to give up their identities. It allows states to be themselves."

I have, frankly, no idea if by 2050 anything like this network will exist, or whether it will join the ranks of the fantastical and doomed, along with the cities teeming with autogyros imagined in the 1930s, or the 1960s' faith in the future ubiquity of hovercrafts. I doubt if anyone else knows, either. But, of all the abstract speculations about what sustainable futures might look like, there has not previously been one so tangible or engaging. Its value at the very least is to get people thinking about what, actually, we do want. OMA's Roadmap is either prophecy or provocation, but whichever way it's worth having.

Come the end of the world, you might like to sit it out in style. All you need is money and a few DIY skills…

Abandon any notion of surviving the apocalypse by doing anything as boringly obvious as running for the highest hill, or eating cockroaches. The American firm Vivos is now offering you the chance to meet global catastrophe (caused by terrorism, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, pole shift, Iran, "social anarchy", solar flare – a staggering list of potential world-murderers are considered) in style.

Vivos is building 20 underground "assurance of life" resorts across the US, capable of sustaining up to 4,000 people for a year when the earth no longer can. The cost? A little over £32,000 a head, plus a demeaning-sounding screening test that determines whether you are able to offer meaningful contribution to the continuation of the human race. Company literature posits, gently, that "Vivos may prove to be the next Genesis", and they are understandably reluctant to flub the responsibility.

Should you have the credentials and the cash, the rewards of a berth in a Vivos shelter seem high. Each staffed complex has a decontamination shower and a jogging machine; a refrigerated vault for human DNA and a conference room with wheely chairs. There are TVs and radios, flat-screen computers, a hospital ward, even a dentist's surgery ready to serve those who forgot to pack a toothbrush in the hurry. "Virtually any meal" can be cooked from a stockpile of ingredients that includes "baked potato soup" but, strangely, no fish, tinned or otherwise. Framed pictures of mountain ranges should help ease the loss of a world left behind.

Vivos says it has already received 1,000 applications.

How long do the rest of us have to decide? "Nobody knows" when disaster will strike but Vivos takes a shot at guessing, sourcing clues from Nostradamus, the Bible and Native American lore to suggest 2019, 2029 and 2036 as danger years. But the real fear is for 21 December 2012, a date forecast for doom by the Mayans and towards which a countdown clock on Vivos's website ticks.

We ought not to get too comfy over the next couple of years either: President Obama's recent warnings about nuclear terrorism proved "timely", a Vivos spokesperson told the Observer. "Doomsday may be closer than many would otherwise like to believe..."

It's warning enough. £32,000? Check. Carpentry skills? Check. Jogging bottoms? Check. Good luck in the hills.