the-sheet.com Your Architecture Resource

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning Landscapes, a research project into the relationship between students, lecturers and researchers and the buildings they use, aims to bring a new creativity to campus design

Student hostels aren't hotels", says Professor Mike Neary, "nor are university campuses business parks." That, though, is what they have been in danger of turning into over the last decade, says Neary, political sociologist, dean of teaching and learning, and director of the centre for educational research and development at the University of Lincoln. "A decade," he says, "in which neo-liberal economics and the business model for education and politics, as well as business itself, appeared to have triumphed. Yet, it's all over now. Finished."

You can tell that Neary is more than pleased that attitudes to education in Britain are changing now that politicians and educators have finally realised that the brutal, roller-coaster ways of global capitalism are no friends to learning. And yet, over the last decade, many universities have invested in eye-catching architecture aimed, he says, at attracting investors and business, as a way of transforming places that should be free-thinking and outside the immediate commercial equation into marketing-driven "brands". Students have become "customers" in business-style machines for teaching; these are expected to serve the economy by slotting graduates neatly into profitable jobs.

To counteract this tendency and help re-think what universities are, what they are for and how they might build, occupy and use space intelligently – even critically, Neary has spent much of the last three years leading the research for a project called Learning Landscapes in Higher Education. This was set up at Lincoln with Professor David Chiddick, former vice-chancellor of the university, in the chair. Chiddick is the town planner, urban and transport economist who led the University of Lincoln from its old home in Hull to the cathedral city in the 1990s. He has been responsible for some fine-looking buildings on the new Lincoln campus, not least the elegant new school of architecture designed by Rick Mather in the long Gothic shadow of the medieval cathedral.

The Learning Landscapes project probed the ways those who commission university buildings, those who run them, as well as those who teach, learn and research in them actually relate to built space. What role, if any, do students and academics play in the design and use of lecture theatres and other conventional teaching spaces? To what extent are new buildings simply supplied, something that staff and students blindly accept? Is there a growing gap between the concerns of academia, architecture and estate management?

Working with the architects and space-planners DEGW, Neary and his colleagues visited 12 universities in Scotland, England and Wales, conducting extensive interviews in each. The team asked their hosts, including student representatives, what buildings on their campus they would like to "keep, toss or create". What sort of buildings and spaces did they think might live up to Neary's "three Es" – "efficiency, effectiveness and expression"?

As John Worthington of DEGW puts it, the practical aim of this research has been "to dissolve the division between estate departments and teaching and learning that so often results in silos of responsibility and a lack of understanding of each others' work and needs."

Neary, though, believes that the research – published in the spring – is only a stepping-stone on the way to campuses that function as well as they should. "It's been an academic exercise," he says, "and this is just what it needs to have been. Universities are academic. What we need to do is to think of the ways in which the process of research, of critical, academic thinking by students and teachers alike can shape the physical environment around them. A university's architecture and the spaces within it, though, might adopt many different forms and models."

Before I get the chance to ask how such buildings and spaces might possibly look, and how they might be used, Neary points me to Virginia Woolf's advice on how to build a university in Three Guineas, a book-length essay published in 1938. Seeing, during the heyday of totalitarianism in Europe, that our universities had done precious little to breed either a respect for liberty or a hatred for war, Woolf believed such institutions should go back to true basics. "Let it be built on lines of its own. It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap easily combustible material, which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions. Do not have chapels. Do not have museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cages. Let the pictures and books be new and always changing. Let it be decorated afresh by each generation by their own hands cheaply."

"The most convincing new university buildings", says Neary, "are those where students are given real responsibility for managing and supervising the spaces within which they learn, as well as acting as support for other students' learning. The Learning Grid at the University of Warwick is the most developed form of this new kind of space."

Neary was at Warwick before Lincoln. Designed by the university library with architects MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, the Learning Grid is, according to its manager, Rachel Edwards, "a technology-rich, flexible and informal learning environment, open 24/7 with a capacity for 300 people". Essentially, this is a fusion of a library and a common room. It allows disciplines to cross. It encourages students to help one another as well as themselves. It is generating fresh lines of research. "It's been breaking down the gap between students and teachers," says Neary, "with students becoming part of the academic project rather than consumers of dispensed knowledge."

Now that Neary had given me a concrete, and successful, example of what a new "learning landscape" might be, my mind flashed back to the visit I made a few months ago to the new Rolex learning centre at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland. Designed by the Tokyo-based architects, SANAA, this extraordinary curved and light-filled building, with its garden courtyards, its continually shifting floors, its almost complete rejection of conventional rooms, its lack of corridors and doors, and its gentle spirit of playfulness and inquiry, has been built to bring students from all faculties together. Here is a happily uncertain place of research, of academic inquiry, of debate, research and new thinking. Everything seems possible here. No restrictions on physical movement or thought. "Our focus", says SANAA, "is always to find different relationships."

This is very much what Neary and his colleagues are rooting for, too. It implies, though, nothing less than a quiet revolution in the ways British universities are designed and run. It also demands fresh and original thinking. "One thing I noticed as we travelled from university to university", says Neary, "was how there's a tendency to copy or clone what other universities have already done. While this leads to some incremental learning about what makes teaching and learning spaces work, it does point to a rush to conformity rather than experimentation."

"You can't contain a university," says Neary, meaning that its academic mind should always be expanding and that architecture and space planning within buildings need to respond to this idea. "I suppose you could sum up my approach, in headline terms, as a damning critique of the neo-liberal university. It is, but it's far from impractical. In fact, as Woolf implied, you could create a new, innovative and academically challenging environment in buildings designed in a spirit of poverty."

Neary doesn't demur when I suggest that is what certain orders of medieval monks tried to do. The austere beauty of a Cistercian monastery was no real bridle to thought, although, of course, such places were there to serve God before anyone or anything else.

So, has much of new university building been carried out in vain over the past decade? "Of course there've been some beautiful and excellent buildings", says Neary. "What's been wrong is the whole approach to treating universities as businesses, as an appendage to the economy, rather than places where ideas can be dangerous."

Learning Landscapes in Higher Education makes the point that while academics have been able to make an important contribution "as clients and customers of the project management process", they need to inject academic ideas into the shaping of university buildings and campuses. The Learning Grid at Warwick and the Rolex learning centre at Lausanne give some idea of what may yet be done, and yet, as Neary would say, these examples, no matter how alluring, are not there to be copied. Universities must work things out for themselves.

Meanwhile, as Morag Schiach, pro-vice chancellor for teaching and learning at Queen Mary, University of London and one of Neary's interviewees, bluntly reminds us, "the extent to which higher education should foster intellectual and cultural liberty in the face of pressing economic demands from industry and government is still unresolved."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just nipping out to mow the roof

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

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

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

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

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

Better than a boring mall

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

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

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

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

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

El Prat de Llobregat, Barcelona

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

Santos Dumont, Rio de Janeiro

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

Dulles Washington DC

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

Kansai Osaka

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

Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong

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

Barajas, Madrid

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

Charles de Gaulle, Paris

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

Banjul Gambia

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

Changi, Singapore

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

King Abdulaziz Jeddah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Straw houses could help to cut carbon emissions – and new research proves that they won't blow down

Building his house of straw didn't do the first little pig any favours, but a modern take on straw-bale construction may well be the grand design of the future if results coming out of the University of Bath are accepted by the construction industry.

Think of a straw-bale house and you might imagine a tumbledown shack that leaks, creaks, slumps and smells somewhat of the farmyard. But step into BaleHaus, a startlingly contemporary looking prototype home that has been built on the Bath campus, and there's nary a wisp of straw to be seen. Instead, you're in the hallway of an upside-down house with two bedrooms and a bathroom on the ground floor, and an airy open-plan living area upstairs. It feels like a little piece of Scandinavia has just arrived in Somerset.

The straw bales, it turns out, are all packed tightly inside a series of prefabricated rectangular wooden wall frames, which are then lime-rendered, dried and finally slotted together like giant Lego pieces, called ModCell panels.

The problem with straw houses, it seems, isn't that they don't work, but that people perceive them as being a bit hippy and not particularly durable. Add to that the problems of getting a mortgage – very few lenders will consider straw-bale construction – and it's hardly surprising that most homes in the UK are still built of either brick or stone.

The benefits of straw, points out Professor Peter Walker, director of the University of Bath's BRE Centre for Innovative Construction Materials, are that "it's cheap, widely available and a good insulator. It's been used in building houses for hundreds of years."

As a by-product of an industry that exists all over the world – the stalks that remain after grain has been harvested – straw also helpfully soaks up carbon from the atmosphere and locks it in, so long as it is not allowed to decompose. For the building industry, which currently depends on materials with very high embedded energy costs – concrete and brick are expensive in carbon terms both to make and to transport – straw could therefore offer a welcome solution to housing's greenhouse gas emissions.

However stylishly modern your environmentally friendly straw-bale house may look, however, you still want to know that it won't get sopping wet in a thunderstorm or go up in a whoosh of flames if you knock over a candle. The results now being published by Walker and his research partner, Dr Katharine Beadle, who have spent the last 18 months testing the BaleHaus against an exhaustive list of risk factors that could rot it, burn it or blow it down, so far seem to be reassuring.

"You always want a bit of drama, but we didn't get it!" laughs Beadle of the day the team took a ModCell unit to a test laboratory and tried to reduce it to ashes by strapping it to a fiery furnace and raising the temperature to over 1,000C.

"It's a standard test to replicate a fire in a building," explains Walker.

"You want a minimum of 30 minutes' resistance; that means you know that a house will at least retain its structural integrity for half an hour, which gives people a chance to get out."

It took an hour-and-a-half of being in direct contact with the flames, says Beadle, before the lime render began to drop off, "and then the straw did start to burn back, but because it's so compacted it suffered more charring than actual disintegration."

After waiting another 45 minutes and finding that the panel still hadn't failed, the team gave up and stopped the experiment, secure in the knowledge that the material had performed way beyond the requirements of building regulations.

When it came to blowing the house down – hydraulic jacks were placed against the walls to replicate wind forces pushing against the bales – the ModCell panels moved a few millimetres, but stayed within the tolerances allowed for by the computer modelling carried out prior to its construction.

That, says Walker, could be very good news for the price of the eventual ModCell building system.

"It means the house is stiffer than it needs to be, so we now have the option of taking away some of that stiffness – ie, reduce its internal timber – and that could reduce the cost."

The approximate cost of the current modular building system for this design is £132,000 from above the concrete slab. For a smallish two-bedroomed house with one large open-plan kitchen/diner, that doesn't seem particularly cheap given that straw is supposed to be inexpensive, and you'd still have to buy the plot and dig the foundations.

"Cost is a challenge to the introduction of this technology, but as a prototype house I think it stacks up well," says Walker.

"The aspiration is that it should be cost-competitive, with more savings coming through reduced heating bills."

To replicate the heat given off by humans and appliances, arrays of incandescent lightbulbs on timers blaze in every room at pre-programmed times of day "to see how much heat escapes, and what level of heating would be needed at different times of year," explains Beadle.

"That environmental modelling will give us all the numbers about the energy the house is predicted to use. And if we are predicting how it will operate given climate change, we can then put in those variables."

Sensors embedded within each wall panel constantly monitor the degree of moisture absorbed and then released back through the breathable lime render into the air outside by the panels. And on the airtightness test that was carried out, BaleHaus came in way under the building regulations threshold, and did considerably better than the far lower "best practice" standard.

Next up is going to be the flood test. Disappointingly, the researchers aren't simply going to leave the bath taps running: instead, they'll stand a panel in a metre of water, measure how long it takes to dry out and assess whether using industrial dryers causes damage to the straw.

"Longer term, we'd like to maybe get some people to live in it, a family of three or four perhaps, and see how it performs in a real-life situation," says Walker.

Student accommodation, I wonder? Walker suddenly looks a bit concerned for his straw-bale baby, so probably only mature, well-behaved responsible students who will promise no rampaging house parties should apply. But who knows when the first straw-bale halls of residence will be built for students desperate for some decent, earth-friendly and thermally efficient digs?bre

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.

It's every dad's fantasy: a state-of-the-art studio at the bottom of the garden. John Crace explores one man's masterpiece

Is it a shed or is it a studio? "Good question," smiles artist Jaspar Joseph-Lester, sizing up the black, asymmetrical, cantilevered structure in the back garden of his east London semi. "I'm not sure. Some friends refer to it as the shed; I guess I'd rather call it my studio work space. But on more than one occasion during the winter, when there was no greenery to soften the design, it was described as a nuclear bunker."

Whatever it is, it's striking. With half the building below ground and with no two walls or windows the same, it's even bigger than it first appears. "The architects [the Latis Group] and I wanted to create a structure that maximised the work space while minimising the footprint, so it made sense to dig out the garden. But we also wanted a design that disorientated people, so you couldn't necessarily tell what was happening on the inside from the outside."

Compromise also played its part. The neighbours on both sides had been reasonably accommodating in the planning process – not least because they, too, had either already built a studio or were thinking about doing so. "There was – how shall I put it? – a certain synergy," he laughs. "No one raised any objections and they both claim to love the design." The real obstacle was Joseph-Lester's partner.

The studio was always planned as his work space, both for creating video installations and for writing, so his partner, film editor Mopsa Wolff, didn't get too much say in its design. "She didn't mind me using the dead space at the end of the garden," he says, "but she insisted both the fig trees had to stay. And that's really how the cantilevered upper storey came about, as you can't build within a certain distance of a tree because of the roots."

The project took about two years and went about £10K over the £20K budget, but Joseph-Lester reckons he still created a lot of space comparatively cheaply. So has it all worked out as intended? "The stairwell down to the door is steeper than we expected, so we'll probably have to put a grate over it to stop the kids falling down," he says. "And it sticks out a couple of feet further into the garden than we thought. You'd be amazed how important 2ft of garden can be in a relationship."

Inside the studio, things haven't entirely worked out either. "You can never be sure how you're going to use a building until you move in, and I'd imagined I'd use the upper floor for thinking and designing, and the ground floor for making things. But I enjoy the ground floor more, so that's where I spend most of my time. And although the building was deliberately designed without phone or internet access, they've somehow made their way in."

There are also unexpected pleasures, such as the worm's-eye view of the garden from the basement-level window, but the interior still looks unfinished. Again that's part accident, part design. "I always wanted the walls to be blank so I could use them as a projection screen, but there's still a load of snagging to do. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever get round to it. I haven't a clue what to do with the floor, so I might just leave it as concrete."

And how does he imagine the building in 10 years' time? "Almost certainly as a place that has been taken over by teenage children, from which I will be banned."

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