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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It was the most famous house in Georgian England, but for some it was a sham and an architectural failure. Amanda Vickery considers its eccentric creator Horace Walpole

If you are an aficionado of architecture, you will know Horace Walpole as the creator of Strawberry Hill (1747-90), in Twickenham, west London, a flamboyant experiment in Gothic revival, forerunner of all those Victorian town halls, churches and stations which define our townscapes. You may also remember him as the author of The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first gothic novel, initiating a spooky literary genre still going strong.

Connoisseurs of Georgian culture recognise the voluble Walpole as a catty commentator on fashionable society. With 48 volumes of his correspondence in print, historians can rely on him for a gossipy opinion on most topics from adultery and chandeliers to wigs and Whigs. Hardly a party was thrown without Walpole on the sidelines taking sly notes for the amusement of posterity.

A new exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum in London throws the spotlight on the peripheral observer and showcases the peculiarity of his taste. It restages Walpole's eclectic ­collection and evokes the dense ­interiors of his summer retreat, Strawberry Hill, as a curtain raiser for the reopening this autumn of the freshly restored house itself.

According to Michael Snodin, ­curator of the exhibition, Walpole "as a lively and incisive commentator shaped the way we see 18th-century politics and society. As the most ­important collector of his time he created a form of thematised historical display which prefigured modern ­museums. And Strawberry Hill was the most influential building of the early Gothic revival."

Walpole (1717-97) was the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister, and Catherine Shorter, daughter of a timber merchant. His parents were estranged even before his birth, the young Walpole remaining with his adored mother in the London house on Arlington Street in Piccadilly, avoiding Houghton – the Norfolk palace raised by his father as a monument to power.

After a conventional education (Eton and Cambridge topped off with the grand tour), Walpole became MP for Callington in 1743, where he never set foot. Effete and feeble, he bore little resemblance to his hearty father. Still he remained loyal to Whig politics and accepted sinecures worth £2,000 a year, bankrolling his "career" as a connoisseur and gentleman of leisure.

To us, Walpole appears decidedly peculiar – etiolated, fastidious and affected – and even in his own times he was considered singular. The writer Letitia Hawkins remembered a pallid aesthete tripping everywhere on his toes. "His figure was not merely tall, but more properly long and slender to excess: his complexion and particularly his hands of a most unhealthy paleness . . . he always entered a room in that style of affected delicacy, which fashion had then made almost natural . . . knees bent and feet on tip toe as if afraid of a wet floor."

Though Walpole had a penchant for the company of old ladies and un­marriageable or disgraced noblewomen, he evaded matrimony, remaining to his death aged 79 what used to be called a confirmed bachelor. Instead he drew about him a collection of highly cultured "dear friends"– men of sensitive taste but lesser background, who shared his obsessions. Walpole had an especially fraught and jealous relationship with Thomas Gray, of the famous "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", whom he met at Eton and took with him on his European tour.

Was Walpole gay? Is Strawberry Hill the manifestation of a gay aesthetic? The questions linger, even though searching for something akin to a ­modern homosexual identity is fruitless. Homosexual acts were criminal – sodomy was a capital offence – but virile men were known to take lovers of both sexes, while effeminate manners were seen as a Frenchified heterosexual weakness.

Walpole's biographers have often considered him effeminate and asexual, or at most passively homosexual. George Haggerty ponders the mystery again in the collection of essays that accompanies the exhibition. Walpole and his close male friends "did not identify themselves and were not identified by their contemporaries as sodomites, although several of them were known to feel desire for members of their own sex". Walpole's life-long correspondent, the Florentine expatriate Sir Horace Mann, was labelled a "finger-twirler" by the diarist and social commentator Hester Lynch Piozzi.

A romantic and erotic camaraderie is detectable among the aesthetes, archly expressed in interior decoration and antiquarianism. Anachronistically, but plausibly, Haggerty sees a camp sensibility at work. Strawberry Hill was to be the playground of affectation, a stage set on which Walpole performed his life, and an irresistible resort for his special friends.

Strawberry Hill was in fashionable Twickenham, a two-hour carriage drive from London, but enjoying some rays of royal glamour from nearby Richmond Palace and Hampton Court. The bosky Thameside bristled with the stately dowagers Walpole so admired, while the illustrious poet Alexander Pope had lived less than a mile away.

In 1747, Walpole leased a nondescript suburban house (built 1698) from Mrs Chevenix, a famous seller of trinkets. "It is a little plaything that I got out of Mrs Chevenix's shop and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw." In modern terms, the house is palatial, but by the standards of Georgian magnificence it was dinky.

"Lord God! Jesus! What a house!" cried Lady Townsend on an early visit. "It is just such a house as the parson's where the children lie at the end of the bed." As the second home of a fashionable gentleman who had a thoroughly classical headquarters in London, it was free from the rules governing the design of houses in town. Walpole set about Gothicising and extending, transforming the villa into "a gingerbread castle", "a Gothic mousetrap", a "paper house". He likened his adventure to that of Lord Burlington's pioneering of the neo-­Palladian in miniature at nearby Chiswick House: "As my castle is so diminutive, I give myself a Burlington air and say that as Chiswick is a model of Grecian ­architecture, Strawberry Hill is to be so of Gothic."

Walpole dated his interest in the Gothic from seeing King's College chapel as an undergraduate at Cambridge, constructed when "Art and Palladio had not reached the land nor methodised the Vandal builder's hand". He was hardly the first to pursue an antiquarian interest in British history or to admire the melancholy dignity of old cathedrals. The Gothic was seen as one decorative idiom among several, suited to informal rooms and garden structures. There was already a pseudo-Gothic summer house in Vauxhall pleasure gardens.

Plenty of nobles lived in crumbling houses, finding romance in heraldry and ancestry, old tapestry and stained glass. Gothic was a ready decorative choice for private chapels, especially for Catholics anxious to assert the continuity of the old religion. It also appealed to women with a strong sense of dynasty. The widow Lady Oxford began a fan-vaulted dining room at Welbeck Abbey in 1742, while Lady Pomfret built a castle-style house on Arlington Street in London (Walpole's own road) in the late 1750s.

Pretentious as he was, Walpole did not claim to have revived the medieval single-handed. He wrote to Mann in Italy for "any fragments of old painted glass, arms or anything", reassuring him of "the liberty of taste into which we are all struck". With papier-mâché friezes, Gothic-themed wallpaper, fireplaces copied from medieval tombs, a Holbein chamber evoking the court of Henry VIII, Dutch blue and white tiles on the floor, and modern oil paintings, china and carpets throughout, Strawberry Hill was hardly a faithful recreation of a medieval manor. Walpole wanted theatrical effect, atmosphere and "gloomth", not a time capsule. ­"Visions you know have always been my pasture . . . Old castles, old pictures, old histories and the babble of old ­people make one live back into centuries that cannot disappoint one."

The Gothic era he plundered seemed to encompass all the centuries before Inigo Jones (who transplanted the principles of Italian renaissance architecture under the patronage of Charles I). Any period from the dark ages to the Jacobean was ripe for plagiarism.

He made no doctrinaire claims. "I do not mean to defend by argument a small capricious house. It was built to please my own taste, and in some degree to please my own visions." Ever delicate, he admitted, "In Truth I do not mean to make my house so Gothic as to exclude convenience and modern refinements in luxury."

Teased by Mann as to whether the garden had to be medieval to match, he ruled "Gothic is merely architecture and as one has a satisfaction in imprinting the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals on one's house, so one's garden on the contrary is to be­ ­nothing but riant [cheerful] and the gaiety of nature." But the garden still had to be picturesque. After a lecture on the ideal effect of the trees, the local ­nurseryman sighed: "Yes sir, I understand, you would have them hang down ­poetical."

Strawberry Hill was a confection, a mock-castle of a fake dynasty complete with a reproduction baronial hall, flourishing the arms and images of putative crusader ancestors on the ceiling. Through his mother, Walpole claimed descent from Cadwallader of Wales. The house became a museum to Walpole's expanding collection of art and relics, such as Queen Bertha's comb and the hair of Mary Tudor in a locket, though he was "outbid for ­Oliver Cromwell's night cap".

Snodin insists on Walpole's originality as a collector. He merged two pre-existing but distinct traditions – that of the virtuoso connoisseur seduced by art of all sorts, but also the antiquarian fascinated by historically significant objects (such as the spur King William drove into the flank of his horse Sorrel at the Battle of the Boyne). By 1797, Walpole had amassed at least 4,000 objects, not including scores of prints, drawings and books. The only things Walpole didn't collect were natural specimens and scientific instruments.

The diversity of Walpole's museum is recreated in the V&A exhibition, from 16th-century miniatures and sumptuous Reynolds portraits to Cardinal Wolsey's red hat. Which are Snodin's favourites? "For sheer glamour it has to be the gilded armour of Francis I, but one of the most curious objects is the black obsidian mirror used by the Elizabethan necromancer Dr John Dee to call up spirits, though Walpole didn't realise that it was originally used by the Aztecs in the human sacrificial rituals of their 'god of the smoking mirror'. We are still looking for some of Walpole's most famous objects, such as the jewelled dagger of Henry VIII."

Walpole wanted his objects to be ­admired. He gave personal tours to posh visitors, but left his housekeeper to herd the hoi polloi, for a guinea a tour. "'Tis the most amusing house I was ever in," remarked Lady Mary Coke, "so many pictures and things to help one to ideas when one wants a fresh collection; entertainment without company."

Walpole even produced a guidebook on his own printing press to initiate the cognoscenti, though inevitably he tired of traffic. "I keep an inn, the sign the Gothic castle," he moaned. "Never build yourself a house between London and Hampton Court. Everyone will live in it but you."

He introduced an advance booking system: "Every ticket will admit the Company between the hours of 12 and 3 before dinner. The house will never be shown after dinner nor at all but from the first of May to the first of ­October." And a final proviso: "They who have tickets are desired not to bring children."

Walpole was aggrieved to discover that visitors love to touch. "Two ­companies have been to see my house last week and one of the parties, as vulgar people always see with the ends of their fingers, had broken the end of my invaluable eagle's bill, and to ­conceal their mischief, had pocketed the piece."

At his death in 1797, the house passed to his cousin's unmarried daughter, Lady Anne Seymour Damer, a celebrated sculptor, and then to the Waldegraves, the family of his great niece. In 1842 the contents were sold off in the auction of the century, most never again seen together until now. (There was a small exhibition in 1980 with no international loans.)

Thanks to Walpole's publicity, Strawberry Hill was perhaps the most famous house in Georgian England, and inevitably fuelled voguish medievalism. But for Victorian purists such as Pugin, it was a sham. For modernists, it was an architectural failure of ghastly influence. BS Allen's Tides in Taste (1937) concluded that "reluctantly but inevitably one is reminded of the flocks of flimsy, starved houses that have sprung up since the war".

Wherever you stand on mock-Gothic, Strawberry Hill delivers un­rivalled access to both ideas and design. It is an exceptionally rich document – so rarely do original house, perspective views, objects, commentary and letters all survive.

For the architectural historian Charles Saumarez Smith, the house is important "not just as an oddity, much visited and admired, but because it was a presage of the way interiors would be used in the future, as a conscious instrument of personal expression, exploiting history to evoke a particular mood: Strawberry Hill was to become a private castle, an escape from time, a place of retreat."

Snodin agrees. "Walpole's cultural legacy was to pioneer a kind of imaginative self–expression in building, furnishing and collecting which still inspires us today. I suppose one of the take-home messages of the exhibition is: why not try it yourself?"

Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill is at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London SW7 (020 7942 2000), from 6 March to 4 July. www.vam.ac.uk

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Exhibition by trailblazing Israeli-born designer, architect and artist opens in London, his hometown for more than 35 years

There are bookshelves that bounce and roll, cutlery that pirouettes, a chandelier that you can text and chairs. Lots and lots of chairs. In what may be one of the most comfortable exhibitions of recent years, Britain's first major Ron Arad retrospective opens tomorrow.

The Barbican's art gallery in London is following up major shows it has held on Corbusier and Alvar Aalto by devoting three months to a designer, architect and artist still very much alive and working. Arad, who was born in Israel but has been based in London for more than 35 years, said he hoped anyone "interested in things" would visit.

The head of art galleries at the ­Barbican, Kate Bush, said: "We want to pay tribute to Ron Arad's very special place in the world of design. He is an incredibly important figure and this exhibition lays out his vision and his process as it has evolved over 30 years."

The show is divided into sections with names such as Volumising, Rolling, Superforming and Scavenging, where one of Arad's most celebrated chairs – the Rover chair, which uses a car seat salvaged from a scrap yard – is exhibited.

Then there is the Failing section, displaying designs that weren't taken up, or were misconceived. That includes the "table that eats chairs" in which chairs can be folded underneath the table top. "I think it was too complicated for the manufacturer," said the show's curator Lydia Yee, "but Ron's still confident that someone will come along."

There have been recent Arad shows at the Pompidou in Paris and Moma in New York, but the one in London was completely ­different, said its curator, Lydia Yee. "Ron wanted to do something new in his home town and we wanted … to show his ­interest in new materials and in new technologies."

There is a crystal chandelier called Lolita which has more than a thousand embedded LED lights and its own mobile number to which one can send texts, which are then displayed.

Arad and his studio have also created mechanical tricks to show off some of the pieces such as a long moving platform for bookshelves called "reinventing the wheel". The idea is that you can roll your bookshelves where you would like them – perfect for the indecisive – but there is a wheel within the wheel so the books remain upright.

For many, Arad will be best known for his chairs, many of which are on display and which are most definitely not for sitting on. A large section of the gallery will, however, contain chairs where visitors can take the weight off their feet and – should they wish – play table tennis on a stainless steel ping pong table designed by Arad to suit his game.

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Theo van Doesburg was one of the most daring and influential artists of the avant garde, yet he is often overshadowed by his contemporaries. A new exhibition is set to change this, writes Simon Mawer

Everyone knows Piet Mondrian, so why is it that almost nobody knows the equally Dutch, equally abstract Theo van Doesburg, subject of a forthcoming exhibition at Tate Modern? Why is Mondrian the celeb while Van Doesburg is a mere footnote to 20th-century art, a name that keeps cropping up while never taking centre stage? It can't be the paintings, because if you're honest you'll admit that the two men – almost direct contemporaries (Van Doesburg was eight years younger) and, for a while, close friends – did virtually the same thing in paint, although I suppose tiny detail is significant in such arcane matters: according to some commentators, Van Doesburg's daring introduction of the diagonal into his work was enough to cause a rift between the two men. We live in days when an artist would have to bottle his grandmother in urine before anyone would be mildly shocked, so it's refreshing to know that in the 1920s an argument over the use of diagonal lines was sufficient to break off a relationship.

Presumably another reason for ­Mondrian's greater fame is those ­little dresses that Yves Saint Laurent ­created in the 60s, which elevated the reclusive Dutch artist to the status of a design icon. But perhaps the major reason is that Mondrian stuck to his guns. Both artists evolved out of the Dutch figurative tradition into complete abstraction at exactly the same time, but while Mondrian remained with his bleak, geometric painting throughout his life, Van Doesburg had other ideas, dozens of them. You reach out to grab Mondrian and what have you got? An abstract painter, rather solitary, rather austere. You try the same thing with Van Doesburg and he's as slippery as an eel. Painter, poet, art critic, designer, typographer, architect, performance artist – he was all those things and more. Proteus himself. A fox to Mondrian's hedgehog.

So who was he? Born Christian Emil Küpper in 1883 into an artistic family in Utrecht, he only became "Theo Doesburg" when he started painting – his adopted name being borrowed from his stepfather. The "van" was added later, in much the same way that Ludwig Mies added "van der" when he merged his mother's maiden name, Rohe, with his own paternal surname. One detects a similar feeling of social insecurity in the two men.

At the start of his career Van Doesburg was a competent figurative painter, his work reminiscent of Van Gogh in early, potato-eater mode; but he soon came in contact with non-figurative painting and in 1916 met Mondrian, newly returned from Paris. The devotion of both men to the creation of a purely abstract art led to the formation of the De Stijl group in 1917 and the publication of its magazine, De Stijl, which Van Doesburg edited and published from its foundation that year until its demise following his early death in 1931.

Van Doesburg's life may have been short but it was energetic. Throughout the 20s his saturnine features, often topped with a homburg and usually accompanied by a cigarette – think Humphrey Bogart – appear in photographs of divers artistic groups from Paris to Weimar, from Berlin to Zurich and Milan. Neo-plasticism, constructivism, suprematism, dadaism, elementarism – the "isms" of the time are bewildering to anybody but a specialist, but Van Doesburg was involved in all of them. Indeed he invented some. He was both gregarious and eclectic, a centripetal element in a diverse and chaotic artistic world. He lectured and published, talked and theorised, attended conferences and congresses and exhibitions, many of which he organised himself. So it is fitting that Tate Modern, in collaboration with the Municipal Museum of Leiden (where De Stijl was launched), has decided to give the man his due. Perhaps as a result of this exhibition he will begin to take his deserved place in the public imagination.

Of all the arts that Van Doesburg touched perhaps his greatest influence lay in the area of architecture and design. Together with the architects JJ Oud and Gerrit Rietveld, it was he who took the flat, geometric painting of the De Stijl group and burst it out into the third dimension. Indeed he even tried to inform his work with a fourth dimension, although with what success is a matter of debate. Certainly he was fired with a thrilling spatial imagination. His axonometric projections of ideal houses, created in conjunction with the young architect Cornelis van Eesteren, are crucial in understanding this concept so it is a shame that they do not form part of this otherwise comprehensive exhibition. A plastic model of one of the proposed buildings (the "Maison Particulière") gives some idea but a 3-D model is not as striking as the original drawings. A model is too literal. In the drawings perspective is ambiguous; walls are no longer supporting structures but floating, intersecting planes of primary colour; rooms are not static boxes but conceptual spaces hovering in the air. The volumes of the buildings seem to explode from an ­inner core, as though erupting into the third dimension and straining for that elusive fourth.

In 1921, armed with such architectural visions (he had been talking of the fourth dimension since 1917), Van Doesburg set off for Weimar, apparently with the intention of mounting an assault on the portals of Walter Gropius's newly founded Bauhaus. Whether or not he expected to be taken on to the staff of the Bauhaus is not clear; what is certain is that his presence was a yeast in the ferment that swirled around the design school. Some, such as Gropius himself, were alienated by Van Doesburg's dogmatic and aggressive views; others, such as the young Mies van der Rohe, were inspired. In June he was publishing De Stijl from Weimar and the next year he began his own De Stijl architecture course, poaching students from the Bauhaus itself. This was a crucial time in the development of the Bauhaus, when it was in the process of moving from its individualistic arts and crafts origins to embrace the uniformity and austerity of style that was soon to be given the epithets "modernist" or "international"; the first architectural style for almost a thousand years not to imitate something else. Van Doesburg's contribution to this shift in emphasis was crucial. He preached geometry and the use of primary colour and the submersion of the individual in the collective, things that later became an integral part of the Bauhaus philosophy.

The German period lasted for almost two years – of frenetic writing, publishing, lecturing and organising – but behind all this activity there is a love story: with Van Doesburg from the start was the redoubtable Nelly van Moorsel. Nelly was a pianist whom he met at an exhibition of the Section d'Or group of abstract painters that he organised in the Hague in 1920. He was 15 years her senior and already married but that did not stand in Van Moorsel's way: she abandoned her orthodox Roman Catholic family and went off with him to Paris. From the outset she considered herself married to him, although in fact Van Doesburg was not divorced from his previous wife until January 1923. They finally married in 1928. They were inseparable; whenever Van Doesburg appears in a photograph – and there are plenty in the exhibition – there is Van Moorsel beside him, often the only woman in the group, her mischievous grin a wonderful counterpoint to his solemn gaze. One can almost hear her laughter.

And there was a great deal to laugh about: besides the rational philosophy of De Stijl, Van Doesburg was actively involved in a movement that seems to embody the exact opposite: Dada. To understand Van Doesburg one must understand this marked polarity in his life: De Stijl on the one hand and Dada on the other. From the sublime to the ridiculous.

Nothing was more influential, or outrageous, or emblematic of its time, than Dada. "Dada is useless, like every­thing else in life," announced the founder of the movement, the poet Tristan Tzara. Dada swept aside traditions and all perceptions of what constitutes art. Its influence is felt right up to the present day. Tracey Emin's unmade bed is Dada. Randomly selected members of the public doing whatever they pleased on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square in London is Dada. The only difference is that Emin's bed and Antony Gormley's curation of the fourth plinth were rather tame, while Dada raised hell.

In Weimar, while pursuing his ideas at the Bauhaus, Van Doesburg had organised the Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists which included such luminaries as Hans Arp, Kurt ­Schwitters, Tzara and El Lissitzky, the Russian constructivist. In 1923, directly after returning to Holland from Germany, the Van Doesburgs partnered the wonderfully barmy Schwitters in a grand Dada tour of Holland. They'd done this performance in Jena the year before; now they performed in 10 different cities before a succession of suitably bewildered audiences. Nelly would play the piano – perhaps Rieti's "Wedding Breakfast of a Crocodile" or an Erik Satie piece they advertised as "Ragtime-Dada". On stage, wearing a monocle and with his face whited up, Van Doesburg would recite from his recent pamphlet Wat is Dada???, while Schwitters, incognito at the back of the auditorium, would interrupt the lecture by barking like a dog. Later Schwitters would be invited on stage where, indifferent to laughter or abuse, he would recite one of his mad Dada poems. In Utrecht a fight broke out after members of the audience invaded the stage and tried to present Schwitters with a wreath of dead flowers and a copy of the Bible. It was, everyone agreed, a most successful evening.

Although few knew it at the time, Van Doesburg's active involvement in Dada predates all this. In 1920 De Stijl magazine published a Dada poem by a certain IK Bonset. More Bonset poems followed in subsequent editions and the same poet also edited the short-lived Dada Magazine Mécano (1922-24) as well as contributing to other Dada publications. "IK Bonset" is actually a Spoonerism (surely the most Dada figure of speech) for "I am a fool" in Dutch (Ik ben sot): it is a nom-de-plume for Theo van Doesburg. To complete the picture there is a wonderful photograph of Nelly playing the part of IK Bonset, wearing false moustache, ­aviator's helmet and goggles, and smoking a pipe. All this is very Dada. The true identity of the poet was not revealed to most of Van Doesburg's friends until after his death.

Shortly after the Dada tour of Holland, like some maniacal product of its own imagination, Dada self-destructed, the Dada Soirée at the Théâtre Michel in Paris famously ending in chaos with the actors attacked on stage by an enraged by then-ex Dadaist ­André Breton. He broke one actor's arm with his walking stick, the poet Paul Éluard was knocked into the footlights, the audience rioted and the auditorium was wrecked. Finally the police were called. More "Rock Around the Clock" than the fourth plinth. Of course, Theo van Doesburg and Nelly van Moorsel were in the audience.

Perhaps the end of Dada was a signal to settle down. The Van Doesburgs re-established themselves back in Paris, living in the outer suburb of Meudon. He began painting again – he had done no painting at all in Germany – and design commissions came his way: the Flower Room in the modernist Villa Noailles in the south of France ­being the first. This was an opportunity, albeit a small one (the room is a mere 1.2m by 1.5m), to put his ideas into practice. Shortly afterwards came a collaboration with Arp and his wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp to redesign the ­interior of one wing of the Aubette building in Strasbourg as an entertainment centre. This work is Van ­Doesburg's masterpiece of interior design. For the first and only time, his powerful and dynamic diagonal blocks of primary colour march across the walls and ceilings of large, public rooms. Sadly the designs did not meet with public ­approval and were covered over in 1938. Only recently have the rooms been restored, finally being opened to the public in their entirety in 2009. The whole complex is now classified as a Monument ­Historique.

With money she had been left in her father's will, Nelly bought a plot of land in Meudon. There, at 29 Rue Charles Infroit, the couple built a studio-house to Van Doesburg's own design. Construction was slow, partly because of difficulties with the building material, which was "solomite", an insulating fabric of compressed straw used by Le Corbusier. Perhaps symbolically, Van Doesburg was building a house of straw: he died within a few months of completion, not in Meudon but in Davos, of a heart attack following a bout of asthma. He was just 47. Painter, poet, critic, architect, of all the dimensions of his short life the most important one was as intangible as the fourth dimension for which he searched: the influence that he had among the avant-garde of the 1920s, an artistic movement that has shaped our own world. This influence cannot be easily measured, but you can get the flavour of it through the more than 400 exhibits, from paintings by Mondrian and Arp to furniture by Rietveld and sculpture by Brancusi, that the Tate has brought together in this important and extensive exhibition.

Nelly van Doesburg, a tireless promoter of her husband's vision, lived on in the house in Meudon until her death in 1975; the house still stands, a modest and poignant memorial to a man who for 10 years was one of the major catalysts of the art world in the 20th century.

Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 from 4 February to 16 May 2010. Ticket office: 020 7887 8888. www.tate.org.uk/modern

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23 January 2010 Preview a major retrospective of works by Dutch artist and founder of the De Stijl movement Theo van Doesburg. At Tate Modern from 4 February 2010

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Exhibiting a rotting tofu hut alongside a dragon made of underpants, Shenzhen's third biennale of architecture glories in the dizzying excess of China's urban growth

At the top of Shenzhen's Lotus Hill, a statue of Deng Xiaoping is frozen in purposeful mid-stride. From here he gazes down on this southern Chinese boom city, teeming with 14 million inhabitants, separated from Hong Kong only by a river and a border. Follow the path down the hill, through manicured gardens and past young families (the average age in Shenzhen is 30, the age of the city itself), and you reach the megastructure of the Shenzhen Civic Centre. Its overwhelmingly massive, blue undulating canopy evokes classical Chinese architecture, but is rendered in bold, postmodern, friendly style. It shelters Shenzhen's governmental buildings, and a vast complex of indoor and outdoor public spaces. This un-forbidden city is currently playing host to the extremely ambitious, yet awkwardly titled, Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, which attempts to document the pace of change in this unwieldy new metropolis.

When Deng declared Shenzhen China's first liberalised Special Economic Zone in 1980, the city – at that point a mere fishing village of 20,000 – became a sort of economic laboratory for the nation as a whole. Where Shenzhen went, the nation followed: into a fervent embrace of capitalism and urbanisation. One of the city's many entrepreneurs is Barack Obama's half-brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, who moved here in 2002 and opened a chain of restaurants called Cabin BBQ (strange, considering he's a vegetarian). Ndesandjo just self-published a semi-autobiographical novel, From Nairobi to Shenzhen, and last week was named the city's official "image ambassador". Shenzhen's patriarch, however, will always be Deng, whose image dominates billboards, and whose waxwork figure enjoys tea with Margaret Thatcher in a bizarre diorama at the top of the city's tallest skyscraper.

The biennale, now in its third edition, is a government-sponsored attempt to establish one thing Shenzhen lacks: a cultural scene. The theme is city mobilisation, which chief curator Ou Ning – who lived here throughout the 1990s, when growth was so fast that the phrase "Shenzhen speed" was born – says is an experiment to unite citizens "in a time that lacks centralised force, spiritual solidarity and practical organisation". While most architecture biennales are unappealing cocktails of dodgy architectural art and dense technical presentations, this one has a more popular touch. More than 60 installations by artists and architects occupy an underground hall at the civic centre, the massive public plaza above it, and various spots around the city.

Most of them are interactive and easy to understand. You're greeted in the main exhibition space by a Chinese dragon composed of 12,000 American Apparel vest tops and underpants, made in California and specially imported, hanging from the ceiling in undulating, colour-coordinated patterns. The piece, by LA-based art duo Ball Nogues, attempts a temporary reversal of the world's normal movement of goods, which usually flows from Guangdong province – known as the workshop of the world – into the US.

Other pieces in the biennale similarly reflect on China and Shenzhen's rampant growth, but without delivering polemics or concrete proposals. This isn't only because of the threat of censorship, but because the role of architecture in a modern city is relatively tiny. Some exhibits merely enrich your thinking about Shenzhen: a video by Danish artist Bjarke Ingels of parkour free runners leaping miraculously around the city's treacherous building sites; a small hut made out of tofu by artist group Polit-Sheer-Form, which is gradually collapsing, rotting, and stinking out the hall; and seemingly ancient images of a sleepy, smalltown Shenzhen, from the 1960s to the early 80s, by local photographer He Huangyou. One photo shows an almost empty Shennan Avenue in 1980. It's reminiscent of the photographs of Sheikh Zayed road in Dubai circa 1990 – another city that's just 30 years old – except here, instead of desert, the road is bordered by rice paddies and the last vestiges of jungle.

The biennale has a provisional feel to it: installations are constantly being rearranged and repaired, and video projections function only sporadically. But the main virtue of the exhibition is that it propels you out into the city with fresh eyes. Liu Xiaoliang's obsessively detailed metal sculptures, Demolition Relocation (2009), model the gradually disappearing "urban villages" of Shenzhen. These haphazard neighbourhoods of densely packed "shakehand" buildings (so close together that residents can reach out of their windows and greet their neighbours) have been constructed in the absence of planning regulations, many of them by former farmers now unable to work. A timeline by the Hong Kong-based architects IDU tells the story of Shenzhen's urban village of Caiwuwei, which had a population of 27,000 before it was demolished to make way for a new business district in 2005. IDU emphasise that this isn't an eviction sob story; the farmers set up the Caiwuwei Village Company to ensure they profited from the development of their land.

Even though Caiwuwei is now mostly gone, Shenzhen still has around 20 other urban villages, which accommodate unregistered migrant workers from all over China (Shenzhen has more than 6 million of them). But what do these villages actually look like? Curious to find out, I asked a biennale volunteer to write down the name of one in Chinese and hopped in a taxi, which eventually dropped me off outside a huge, luxurious mall called Holiday Plaza. I assumed that the taxi driver had misinterpreted the directions, or that this urban village had also recently bitten the dust. But, just a block away, opposite a surreal amusement park called Window of the World – complete with a replica Eiffel Tower bedecked in neon Chinese characters – I discovered the dark, intricate warren of the Baishizhou urban village. It's an outdoor shopping mall, with tiny storefronts and ramshackle stalls selling an unimaginable array of stuff, from knock-off DVDs to vegetables and vitamins. There's no division between indoors and outdoors: family life spills on to the streets and all business activity, such as shoe mending, sewing, wood-cutting, hair-cutting, internet surfing, pool-playing, and most of all, cooking, is done out in the alleyways and in the main square – which also has a hospital in it.

Urban villages might be Shenzhen's equivalent of the hundreds-of-years-old hutongs in Beijing. It would be a travesty if they too were demolished to make way for gated apartment complexes and sterile shopping centres. Might Shenzhen's urban planners learn from these unplanned but apparently highly functional neighbourhoods? In November, a 47-year-old woman named Tang Fuzhen in Sichuan province set fire to herself and died rather than be evicted from her home, which stood in the way of developers. Last week, the government resolved to defend residents' property rights against such illegal eviction and demolition. So perhaps there is hope for Shenzhen's exceptionally energetic, if dirty and often derided, urban villages. Alternatively, as IDU pointed out at the biennale, the farmers themselves may choose to cash in on their increasingly valuable property.

Back at the biennale, late at night, the sound of screeching and creaking cranes echoes wistfully across the plaza. It's merely a sound installation by the architects DnA. But I heard exactly the same noises from building sites everywhere in Shenzhen. And up on the civic centre plinth, overlooking the plaza and the city beyond, Bureau des Mésarchitectures have constructed a pair of swings, called Double Happiness (2009), raised on a 10-foot-tall platform. It's the biennale's most popular piece, and it sends you lurching out towards the luminous horizon of skyscrapers, as if propelling you into the future. You're made to feel both nauseous and exhilarated.

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V&A, London

At one point in last week's party to celebrate the V&A's new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, I slipped the roaring champagne-chugging throng and visited the (refurbished) loo for relief and reflection, each of a profound nature. Lavatories are always revealing of any civilisation's achievements. Here I found some of ours. There was a Duravit urinal with a trompe l'oeil fly in the target area and a Dyson hand-drier. I'm not one to repudiate the modern world, but compared to upstairs, these made me a bit sad.

For the first time, the museum's astonishing treasures from these defining moments of European civilisation are rationally and beautifully displayed. And the effect is exalting, transcendental. It is an entirely new museum-within-a-museum. If these galleries were a standalone in any other country, it would immediately become one of the world's great museums. Whole institutions have been built around less than Leonardo's Codex Forster, but this is only one of nearly 2,000 superlative objects on display. That these new galleries are only a portion of the whole V&A is bewilderingly wonderful. Here is a resource of incalculable value and meaning.

Architecturally, bright new space has been created within the dark, eclectic chaos of the old museum. What we think of as the V&A is, in fact, mostly an Edwardian facade by Sir Aston Webb, disguising confused layers of different buildings behind it. The unifying effect is illusory: it has always been difficult for even the keenest visitors to make sense of the V&A's collections. Until now.

The new galleries have been designed by McInnes Usher McKnight Architects (Muma) who won the commission in 2003, just three years after the practice was founded. It is their first substantial work. Essentially, Muma ingeniously recovered dark, neglected space in the old museum and fused it with existing cavernous galleries to create three levels bound by a "central orientation hub".

The recovered space is roofed by heroic structural glass, making natural top-lighting a feature of what had hitherto been Stygian gloom. The new volumes are so accommodating that one exhibit is the entire front elevation of Sir Paul Pindar's house. Pindar was the ambassador to the Ottoman court and consul at Aleppo. His house, once on the site of what is now Liverpool Street station was one of the few survivors of the Great Fire. It has not looked so good since 1666.

To describe the individual treasures, mesmerising as a list may be, does nothing to indicate the whole magic of what is now available. Still, it would be negligent not to record that you can see the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries and the Thomas à Becket enamelled casket from Limoges, a superlative object which once contained relics of the martyr. There is the chapel of Santa Chiara, built in Florence in 1494, which the V&A claims to be the only Italian renaissance building outside Italy. Indeed, the museum's collection of Italian sculpture is rivalled only by Florence and Rome. Now it is properly accessible.

Indeed, accessibility is our new best friend. When I was at the V&A in the 80s, the great Giambologna sculpture, Samson and a Philistine (an audacious design since its vast substance is anchored at only five slender points) was in the gloom and once carelessly thwacked by a contractor's scaffolding pole. A Michelangelo drawing had been lost and the hapless director posed for photographers holding a postcard of it. Now, Giambologna is available in all his dramatic swagger in a courtyard garden with tinkling fountain while Leonardo's great Codex is interactively digitised. The modern display cases have fabulously sophisticated mitred glass by Hahn of Frankfurt allowing perfect visual access, works of art in their own right.

On any basis this would all be marvellous, but I sensed something special in the air on the opening night. There was quite extraordinary passion in the crowd. Why was this? Because the exhibits offer rare access to the sense of wonder. They satisfy appetites for physical quality and moral substance which have, by and large, been ignored in the exploitative lightweight crapola served up by, shall we say, the Turner prize. Of course, no one bright enough to walk around unaided needed to be persuaded that Donatello is an artist of the very highest rank, but to have the manipulated enterprise and care that is the Chellini Madonna presented with such immediacy is an epiphany. And not one available in Italy.

In these troubled times, there was a mood of near-religious enthusiasm among the guests. Not that the hedge-funded crowds were dressed in Primark, but the sight of Opus anglicanum needlework does remove you from the comings and goings of shopping. It was extraordinary to see great art enhancing moods: for those who find the Duravit fly and the Dyson Airblade fail fully to address the enigmas of existence, there are object lessons in the objects on display here.

So it is melancholy to note that among the crowds on the opening night, I did not see any leading representatives of the architecture or design professions. So much for Renaissance man. Cue Dark Ages?

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East London's new Raven Row gallery is making a splash not only with its Ray Johnson exhibition but its brilliant architecture

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Guardian architecture critic Jonathan Glancey takes a first look inside, with director Iwona Blazwick and artist Rachel Whiteread

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