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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London SE5; London SE15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reservations: see studioeastdining.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terunobu Fujimori's Beetle's House

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

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

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

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

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

The Maxxi gallery is a masterpiece fit to sit alongside Rome's ancient wonders – but what's it like with art on the walls?

It is a guilty secret of the fraternity of architecture critics that we spend much of our time reviewing unfinished buildings or buildings that are not yet performing their intended use. This is like theatre critics writing only about rehearsals or restaurant writers scoffing their grub in the kitchen, before the chef has quite finished adding the last artistic dabs of goo and green stuff to the composition on the plates.

But buildings are slow to build. Impatient writers, with an immature desire to be the first to cover this or that new monument, like to rush in. It suits architects, too, if critics jump in before their creations are disturbed by the mess of use and occupation. If there are still dustsheets in the corners and men fixing up the last details, it only adds to the aura of promise.

So last November, a gang of writers trooped off to Rome to see the squirming concrete forms of Maxxi, the new museum of 21st-century art designed by Zaha Hadid. It was the most significant new building for decades in the Eternal City (which is mostly quite happy with the monuments it already has) and a major work of the most famous woman architect in history.

It looked magnificent and an elegant party was held for dignitaries, beauties and hacks, which showed off its swooping stairs and ramps to perfection. But this museum of art as yet contained no art, and the question remained: would its powerful architecture overwhelm the contents it is supposed to serve? The suspicion was that it would, but no one really knew. It was like a wonderful ship in a dry dock, which had not yet been proved to float.

Last weekend, Maxxi finally opened, with art. There were more parties and more dignitaries and beauties engaged in a three-dimensional passeggiata on the catwalk-like architecture. Fellini would have had fun with this place. And, at last, the general public was allowed in. It became possible to gain some idea whether the Maxxi's ¤150m cost, the 11 years it has taken to realise, and its position as a contender for this year's Stirling prize, were justified.

The building is located in a quietish district north of the city's centre. There are a lot of barracks, both active and decommissioned, one of which formed the site of the museum. Hadid's aim was to bring in the urban energy and intensity that was missing. She also wanted to create a modern interpretation of the many layers of history out of which Rome is built.

Her building is a composition of bending oblong tubes, overlapping, intersecting and piling over each other. Powerful lines, horizontal or nearly so, sweep round corners and draw you on. It is restless and not graspable from any fixed point. The imagery is of flow and movement and it resembles a demented piece of transport infrastructure, but it is also massive. With its gigantic cantilevers and hefty concrete, you feel the weight.

There is an interweaving of internal and external, of piazza, atrium and galleries. A huge overhang creates a shaded space at the entrance, a much-warped version of a classical portico. Cuts and slits in the structure create collaged views from outside in and inside out. Some fragments of the original barracks remain, part engulfed by the new structure.

Inside, black steel stairs and bridges, their undersides glowing with white light, fly across a void. Teeming with visitors, they are partly like the grand stairs of the Paris Opera, part Dalek city. They take you off to the galleries, which are themselves works of frozen motion. They slope and step. They are linear and without columns. The walls incline and curve. The design generates what Hadid calls "confluence, interference and turbulence", with ramps and passages taking you on unexpected loops around the building and sometimes into dead ends.

It has lumpy and clumsy bits and collisions of detail that don't seem intended. There are moments when the swoosh of the architecture is momentarily becalmed and you find yourself in a prosaic passageway. Materials and details don't always behave as they are ideally supposed to. But the totality is fascinating, compelling and evokes a powerful urge to explore and discover.

And then there's the art. Maxxi's curatorial direction has always been a little vague, beyond the broad ambitions to be forward-looking and "multi-disciplinary and multi-purpose", which means, for example, that it will exhibit a lot of architecture as well as visual art.

Its budgets haven't enabled the museum to build much of a collection, but the opening exhibitions include the late Gino De Dominicis, whose morbid works include a giant, prone skeleton outside the front door, and the sophisticated 20th-century architect Luigi Moretti, whose most famous building was the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington DC.

There is also Spazio, the kind of generalising exhibition with which museums like to open. It includes works by Yinka Shonibare, Gilbert and George, Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol and Lucio Fontana. There is an Anish Kapoor, engaged in a somewhat brittle dialogue of mutual celebrity with the architecture of Zaha Hadid.

The important revelation is that these works do not, as some predicted, shrivel and die in the mighty volumes of Hadid's architecture. The first impression is festive and celebratory, of a field of creation in which the boundaries between exhibitions are not particularly clear. It is true that robust pieces, and installations and projections, prosper more than smaller, two-dimensional works, but the design allows for walls and chambers to be inserted that bring down the scale where necessary. Moretti's models and drawings are relatively slight and fragile and are inserted into what might have been a daunting hall, yet they make one of the better-looking architecture shows of recent times.

The building does not exactly cherish its contents, either. The overall feeling is impressionistic and a little casual. Maxxi is "emotive rather than purely didactic", as one of the curators puts it. It is not a place that favours the slow and measured contemplation of works and you wouldn't want to show Vermeers here.

The design does not grow organically from the presentation of the exhibits. It offers something else, which is an intensified, dramatised, out-of-the-ordinary version of an urban promenade, in which both architecture and art contribute to the experience. It is about spectacle, display, seeing and being seen. It has something in common with a baroque church, where the art is not always the centre of attention, and some of it may not be very good, but the totality is what counts.

In the city of the Pantheon and of Bernini, it was probably essential that a new building like Maxxi would make a noise. Hadid's design does this, but it is more rich and complex than just noise: it is not a one-hit concept like other buildings labelled with the dread word "iconic". The first reaction of most people who see it is simply to marvel at this strange, impressive thing. In the end, this sensation trumps its imperfections.

Norman Foster is a fascinating character, but this isn't quite the biography he deserves

It was the misfortune of Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan, that his £37m Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, a 62-metre-high pyramid that would host the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions and house a 1,500-seat opera house, should open in the same year – 2006 – as the film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Borat, of course, was not really Kazakh, but somehow he seized the world's imagination rather more vigorously. The pyramid, an aloof and scaleless thing, seemed to have the same preposterous wannabe spirit as the film character, but without the charm.

This is a comparison you will not find in Deyan Sudjic's Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture. Foster was the architect of the pyramid. Sudjic, formerly of this parish, is an insightful and engaging writer whose eye for absurdity wouldn't usually pass up one like this. But this book obeys different rules to previous works such as The Edifice Complex or The 100 Mile City.

Described as a biography "of one of the world's foremost architects, written with his full co-operation", it tells the story of how Foster worked his way up and out of a terraced house near a railway viaduct in Levenshulme, Greater Manchester. It reveals an early environment marked by poverty of aspiration as much as by material lack, and charts Foster's progress from there to Manchester University, Yale, leadership of a huge business, a seat in the Lords and an array of honours.

It takes in the key projects along the way: the most sensational building Ipswich has seen and ever will see; a cool hangar for art at the University of East Anglia; the tower of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in Hong Kong, and so on to the Gherkin, Wembley stadium, the Great Court of the British Museum, the Hearst tower in New York, the breathtaking Millau viaduct, and Beijing airport. It finishes with Masdar, the zero-carbon "city" that Foster is designing in Abu Dhabi.

Sudjic explains how Foster has helped to transform his profession. When he started out, it was largely a gentlemanly, small-scale business, a sort of cottage industry with a strong emphasis on the handicraft of models and drawings. Projects outside an architect's country were the exception. An architect of Foster's standing might have staff that could be measured in the dozens at most. Today, Foster's practice employs well over 1,000 people.

The book tells this story clearly and it makes a good introduction to Foster. What it lacks is a sense of revelation. It touches on some of the more sensitive issues in Foster's career, but it accepts the official version. These issues include the housing in Milton Keynes to which pitched roofs had to be added, the expense of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, the wobble in the wobbly bridge, the building of monuments for the dubious Kazakh regime, the break-up of his partnership with Richard Rogers, and the later departure of his partner Ken Shuttleworth.

Foster, mostly presented as master of all he touches, is described as having been "caught up unwittingly" in the Golden Orange project in Moscow, in which the Tretyakov Gallery, home of the finest collection of constructivist art in the world, was to be demolished and absorbed into a commercial development that looked like a pile of orange segments. It's not that Foster has to always come out badly, but one expects such episodes to be examined.

Sudjic also skirts over Foster's personal life. The traumatic death from cancer of his first wife, Wendy, is described quite briefly. His colourful second wife, Sabiha, gets only a line, an exclusion in which one might detect the influence of his third wife, Elena. The book is more revealing about Foster's relationship with his hardworking and thwarted parents, which is shown to be distant and a little regretful, but not without affection.

The most touching moment comes when Foster flies to Australia to see his uncle, in order to find out more about his long-dead mother, in particular whether she was adopted as a child. When he gets there, the uncle's mind is missing. The matron in the nursing home advises Foster to wait for one of the uncle's lucid days, but the next day he dies.

Foster's personal life is none of our business, except that we expect such things in biographies. But the book could also be more challenging in its architectural criticism. For most of Foster's career, the most common objection to his work has been that it is "grey". Is this fair? More recently, he has discovered extravagant forms, especially in his Russian projects, such as the vast silver obelisk of the Russia Tower, or Crystal Island, a sci-fi glass tent the size of four Pentagons. Are these projects anything other than megalomaniac bling? Conceivably, yes, but the question has to be asked.

In other words, this official biography is too official. Timed to coincide with Foster's 75th birthday, it sounds too much like a speech at the party. It is to Foster as the pyramid is to President Nazarbayev: a monument to a great leader that doesn't quite tell the whole story. The Foster way is to smooth conflict and contradictions into a neutral appearance, to turn chaos into order, but this should not extend to the writing of a book about him.

It is a shame. Foster is one of the most remarkable people this country has produced in modern times. He is also a fascinating character for a biography. He is big enough to withstand a more robust treatment, which would indeed be a heightened form of respect. Excessive deference is a vice of too much architectural writing in Britain and it is to the benefit of neither author nor subject that it should be so prevalent here.

Rowan Moore is the Observer's architecture critic

London's new tallest building may trigger tower mania, but at least it's tasteful – unlike the Pompidou's offshoot

It is the most expensively and extensively argued-over building in modern Britain, the subject of a multi-million-pound public inquiry. It is the fruit of 12 years' labour since its conception, and £500m expenditure. At 202 metres plus a 28-metre mast, it is the tallest building in the City of London, and higher than such well-known icons as the Gherkin, the BT Tower, Centre Point and Tower 42, formerly the NatWest tower. It is also a work of personal redemption on the part of its developer, the once-imprisoned and nearly-bankrupted Gerald Ronson. Yet it is hard now, contemplating its almost complete exterior, to see what the fuss was about.

This is the Heron Tower, a suave corporate work that Ronson has described as "six-star", and "prime-prime". Rather than aim for a single corporation to occupy its 43,000 square metres, it offers a series of "villages" to small-but-powerful businesses. Notably devoid of maypoles, pigshit, thatch, incest and whatever else might traditionally be associated with village life, these will instead be three-storey units, each with its own atrium, lovingly supported by an array of hotel-like services to create an "Advanced Business Life Environment". It has a three-storey rooftop "sky bar" and restaurant from which occupants can contemplate the extent of their power. A smaller neighbouring tower will one day contain a Four Seasons hotel, for their further comfort and convenience.

The style of the building is accomplished late 90s commercial modern. Glassy, grey and silver, with exposed Zs of structural bracing, it descends from Norman Foster's Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. With an asymmetric form, pointy, picturesque top and lifts running up the side, it also has a touch of Richard Rogers. It is actually the work of the American multinational Kohn Pedersen Fox, although the partners most involved, Lee Polisano and Fred Pilbrow, have since departed to set up a practice called PLP.

It dates from a time before City developers fully acquired a mania for "iconic architecture" and for proposals with wild blobs and curves. As it turns out, these icons have so far rarely been built, and compared to them the Heron Tower looks almost restrained. As in most modern commercial architecture much of the architect's job is to rearrange the cladding and glazing packages, which is here done with some skill and judgment. Also to create a stylish lobby. At the Heron Tower the future lobby is still full of scaffolding, but the computer rendering shows an ample, airy, glassy affair with a huge Blofeltian fish tank.

The tastes of the exclusive village people who will occupy the tower give its architecture an aura of quality. It proclaims its greenness, with photovoltaic cells, and the positioning of lifts to the south, to reduce overheating from the sun. It has an "excellent" BREEAM rating, which is the official gauge of sustainability. It is not precisely sensitive to its surroundings, but it is not offensive to them either. It is like a City suit: bespoke, well made, but with a hint of aggression.

It seems that, for Ronson, part of its function is to celebrate his recovery from two traumas 20 years ago. In 1990 he was imprisoned for his part in the Guinness share-trading scandal when others more guilty than him, as he sees it, got away with it. In the early 90s his billion-and-a-half-pound business almost folded, and had to be bailed out by the likes of Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch. He now boasts of the fact that his tower, out of the last decade's many skyscraper proposals, is (with help of funding from the Sultanate of Oman) the one that's being built. The fact that it is the tallest building in the City and the second tallest in the country after Canary Wharf – its height pushed up through amendments to its original planning permission, and assisted by a functionless spire – is no accident.

For the wider world its significance is that the 2002 inquiry, in which English Heritage made a stand against the march of towers, has shaped the planning of towers in British cities ever since. EH argued that the tower should be stopped, although it did not breach the well-defined rules protecting views of St Paul's, because they said it still encroached on Wren's masterpiece. They were particularly concerned about the vista of the dome from the terrace of Somerset House even though, as supporters of the Heron Tower pointed out, this could equally easily be obscured by the growth of nearby trees, which required no planning permission. Now the tower is built it does indeed obtrude on this view, but you have to walk to the depopulated end of the terrace to catch it at all.

EH picked the wrong battle and lost. Their defeat opened the way for an array of tower proposals, in cities like Manchester and Birmingham as well as London, far more assertive and intrusive, and usually less well designed, than the Heron. The now-built Broadgate Tower, much lower than the Heron but more damaging to views of St Pauls from Waterloo Bridge, went through with scarcely a murmur. Many of the post-Heron towers are not built yet – which gives the lie to their supporters' claims that they are economically vital – but some will be.

Heron offers a niche, boutique product for a financial elite. It is an above-average commercial building without the instant impact of its smaller neighbour, the Gherkin, but also less crude in its detail. What it shows is that skyscrapers are not essential emblems of a powerful modern city, but neither are they inevitably destructive blots on the landscape. They are just one way among many of building things in cities, albeit slower and more difficult than most, and thanks to their visibility inviting more scrutiny from planners.

Meanwhile in Metz, eastern France, they are trying their hand at a different kind of landmark. This is the Centre Pompidou-Metz, an €86m project where works from the Parisian mothership's magnificent collection will be on temporary display. Despite the fact that ownership of Metz, held by Germany from 1870 to 1918 and 1940 to 1944, was a contributing factor to two world wars, it now has a forgotten air. The new building is an attempt to get the city noticed again.

It is designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, in collaboration with the Frenchman Jean de Gastines and the Londoner Philip Gumuchdjian. Ban is famous for his inventive structures in paper, cardboard, bamboo and timber, especially after disasters including the 1995 Kobe earthquake, but also for delightful private houses in which walls disappear or take the form of huge curtains. His concept for Metz was a big billowing all-encompassing roof of Teflon supported on a timber lattice, under which accommodating skirt would be a loosely assembled stack of galleries, and a big atrium for people to do what they will. As in the Pompidou in Paris the relation to outdoor space is important, even if the periphery of the Lorrainois city is less vibrant than the Marais. A public garden the size of the piazza outside the original Pompidou has been installed next to Ban's building.

The Pompidou's concept sounds generous and creative, and the choice of Ban promising, but it was with mounting desolation that I toured it last week. The Ban approach demands both lightness of touch and grace in the details. This kind of building should feel as if it has just landed, and could as easily move on. Here, cross-bred with the concept of a civic monument, it has become ponderous and confused. Different materials – wood, Teflon, polycarbonate, steel, plaster – collide in unappetising ways. The atrium feels redundant, the gallery spaces under-considered. Steel takes over from the timber structure, no doubt for practical reasons, which compromises its essential simplicity. Things are not helped by an opening exhibition called "Chefs-d'Oeuvre?" which is as vapid as its title.

The works in the show – Matisse, Picasso and the rest – are extraordinary, and give reason to hope the museum will prosper. But architecturally the best outcome is the office Ban built to achieve it. A timber-and-cardboard tube latched onto an upper level of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, this shows Ban's invention at its best, and also responds to the Centre's original freewheeling spirit of letting anything happen, a spirit that has somehow got mislaid.

Nicholas Lezard on how planners destroyed Britain

It may be a truism that this country lost more buildings to town planners than to the Luftwaffe, but it is still worth mentioning. Here are 180 pages, each illustrated with one or more photographs, which document what can only be a fraction of the buildings and vistas we have lost.

Stamp quotes a recent conclusion, regarding Hull, but it applies everywhere: "What has gone are the accents of the cityscape, the varied shapes, textures and materials, the undoubted wealth of craftsmanship, the unexpected or bizarre incident; items that there is now no way of matching, for neither money nor skills are forthcoming."

This is, in short, a very depressing book – but one that is wholly necessary. Look, for example, at the photograph of Woburn Square, Bloomsbury, gorgeous enough even without the steeple of Christ Church in the background. The picture was taken in 1941, and you expect to read that this was destroyed in an air raid; but no, the culprit was the University of London, which demolished the church and most of the square in 1974. A quick look at Google Street View confirms that it has not been replaced by anything as lovely – but then you don't really need before-and-after pictures; you know what the replacements look like.

Decades previously, in 1937, Robert Byron could denounce the following for "the ruin of London ... and for destroying without recompense many of the nation's most treasured possessions": "The Church; the Civil Service; the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council; the hereditary landlords; the political parties; the London County Council; the local councils; the great business firms; the motorists; the heads of the national Museum ..." Once the bombers and universities could be added to that roster, that was more or less it – and even when the buildings the former damaged could have been restored, planners, eager to proceed with what they had been itching to do long before the war, demolished on the slightest pretext. (Stamp places the initial blame for the "Baedeker Raids", which destroyed treasured towns devoid of military importance, on our own "Bomber" Harris, "that repellent figure who ... decided to attack the ancient, beautiful cities of Lübeck and Rostock because they were full of old timber buildings which would burn well.")

But you still might come away with very slightly mixed feelings. I would not have cared greatly to go to the frankly scary-looking Royal Insurance buildings in Park Row, Leeds (although the 1950s block shown next to it is as forgettable as it is possible to be), and you can see why the nine-storey tenements in Edinburgh got the chop, or how, as Stamp puts it, the "Victorian and earlier buildings, often smoke-blackened and neglected, were inextricably associated ... with the trauma of industrial decline and the loss of civic pride".

Here, then, is an example of how the opposing forces of good intention and blindness, or utility and greed, can conspire to devastate a country. There was something very silly indeed about Dundee's Royal Arch ("grotesque but loveable", says Stamp, and he's right), but it wasn't in the way or doing anyone any harm, and it was dynamited in 1964 for no good reason.

Coventry's Elizabethan heritage was more or less wiped out in the 1930s; "even without the second world war, old Coventry would probably have been planned out of existence anyway". Its first city architect was delighted to note that the bombs had given him the best chance to put his plans into action, a comment which tells you all you need to know about the priorities of urban planners. And as for Worcester – in 1968, Nikolaus Pevsner was describing as "totally incomprehensible" the mutilation inflicted upon its medieval heritage by its council.

This book could have been many times the size. But there are lessons enough here to be learned by those who are not too deaf to listen or too blind to see; and not everything has been lost. Yet.

Shanghai Expo; London

I've always hoped that expos and world fairs would lie down and die. They are vast, extravagant pretexts for national and commercial posturing. They are miserable to visit, entailing foot-aching tramps and long queues to visit pavilions that are essentially 3-D powerpoint presentations. They are endless campuses of bluster, wind, spin and deceit. They are insanely expensive. With stunning hypocrisy they give themselves environmental themes: "Humankind – Nature – Technology", for example, or "Love the Earth". There are few things less sustainable than building several billions worth of structures that will last a few months, and inviting millions to fly to see them.

Like the Olympics they proclaim regeneration and leave behind wildernesses of decay and debt, but they lack the excitement and point of the Games. There was a time, touring the floundering Hanover Expo 2000, when I dared to believe it might be the last of its kind, but they have come back bigger than ever. The Shanghai Expo, opening on 1 May, has cost twice as much as the Beijing Olympics and is expected to attract 70 million visitors.

The British government has often had a tepid approach to expos, contributing national pavilions that look like trade show escapees, and too-obviously follow the agendas of their commercial sponsors. This attitude could be seen as uninspired philistinism, which it possibly was, but it could also be seen as giving expos an appropriate degree of respect.

In Shanghai, however, they have pulled out all the stops, and for obvious reasons. We want to be friends with China, or at least our government does, so we don't want to snub their big party with a below-par pavilion. UK Trade and Investment, the government agency that is one of the project's sponsors, wants to show that Britain is a modern, creative country and not just the land of Harry Potter. Such agencies always want to do this, but apparently the Chinese are particularly persistent in thinking of Britain as a place of fog and bowler hats.

So a pavilion was commissioned from the designer Thomas Heatherwick that, despite reports of creative conflicts in its making, promises to be the star of the show. Polls held in China in advance of the expo ranked its design second only to the Chinese pavilion. When the expo had a trial opening last week, crowds stormed the security guards at the entrance to the British pavilion, and overwhelmed them.

The most arresting thing about Heatherwick's design is that it looks like a head of hair, or a dandelion in seed, or a hedgehog. Its centrepiece is a round-cornered cuboid formed by translucent wands, which wave in the wind. As we expect buildings neither to be hairy nor in motion, these qualities give it a certain charm.

The hairy thing sits on an uneven plane something like crumpled paper, to symbolise, in the gushy rhetoric of expos, a just-unwrapped gift from Britain to China. The plane, the size of a football pitch, is a gathering place, where people can sit or wander, and where performances will be held. Its raised edges also enable the duller parts of the brief – offices, hospitality suites – to be tucked underneath.

A tour around the site takes visitors past a series of installations themed on the role of nature in British society, culminating in the interior of the hairy cube/dandelion/hedgehog. Here the other ends of the wands form a glowing fuzz, and the end of each wand entraps rare seeds, 217,300 in all, from Kew Garden's Millennium Seed Bank project which aims to preserve the world's most endangered seeds. Heatherwick calls this space the "seed cathedral", and waxes lyrical on the beauty of the exhibits. "One seed could be the reason why your granny goes on living, or a whole country's economy can be based on a particular crop. Nothing could be more important than that."

Heatherwick's design is a brilliant response to what an expo pavilion is. It is outstandingly memorable. It does not rely on endless texts, or video projections, or touch screens, for its effect. You can just look at it, and get it, and the crumpled plane means that people experience the pavilion even if they don't queue to go inside the seed cathedral. It will offer refreshment amid the deep fatigue that expos generate.

It possibly won't deliver new insights into the human condition, or even say much that is meaningful about modern Britain, but deep insight has never been the way of expos. The shame is that, in order to achieve this nugget, the waste and dross of an expo has been created. Wouldn't it be better to have one without the other? Wouldn't it also be better if this kind of creative effort were expended on the places where people actually spend their daily lives?

Meanwhile, back in Blighty, the latest twists in the Chelsea Barracks saga are doing their best to disprove the expo message that we are a happening, go-ahead country. About a year ago this site became famous when Prince Charles backed opponents of a Richard Rogers-designed row of glistening blocks for the site, which was then dropped by the site's owners, Qatari Diar. The prince was, he said, acting on behalf of local people.

Now a new plan has emerged, by Dixon Jones, Squire and Partners and Kim Wilkie Associates. Details are still sketchy, but images show an updated version of Georgian squares and terraces that handle shifts in scale more gently than Rogers's more abrupt design. It can be built in phases, which is practical for the developers.

The new scheme looks decent and reasonable while leaving you wishing that there was a third way that was neither Rogers's stridency nor the cautious conservatism now on offer. But some of the most significant aspects of the new scheme are nothing to do with architectural style.

There will be less to benefit the public, in the form of sports facilities, that the admittedly generous Rogers scheme offered. The new project offers half as much open space as the Rogers scheme, which also looks more constrained and regimented. Some will be used for productive gardens, which will be nice, but far less space is given to children playing or kicking a ball around.

This will be popular with many local residents, particularly those who live in the extremely expensive streets to the north of the site and don't especially want unruly kids nearby. On the other hand there are council and housing association blocks to the east, which are desperate for more open space. These same blocks find that the bulkiest parts of the new development are shovelled up against them, creating a chasm-like street where there were previously open views.

And the new plan shoves much of the required affordable housing onto a new block, not formerly part of the Chelsea Barracks site, close to the council estate. This threatens to reinforce the division between haves and have-nots that already exists in the area. It is also contrary to Westminster city council's policy of mixing affordable and, as it must be called, unaffordable housing. Thus the prince's influence has indeed worked on behalf of local people, but for the rich ones rather more than the poor ones.

Design Museum, London

Given that they house hundreds of millions of people, African cities are not much talked about over here. They're not much recorded, nor analysed. With few exceptions, their monuments are unknown in Europe and places like Yaoundé, Nouakchott and Niamey conjure few mental images. Only occasionally are expeditions launched to explore them. Rem Koolhaas did a study of Lagos a few years back and there was a prize-winning study of Kinshasa at the Venice architecture biennale.

Now architect David Adjaye, born in Tanzania of Ghanaian parents and living and working in London, has done something truly unusual. Over a period of 10 years he has travelled to every capital city in Africa, bar only, for reasons of personal safety, Mogadishu and Algiers.

His photographs of these cities are on show at the Design Museum in London, pending their publication by Thames & Hudson later this year. They are shown in three rooms painted with hot tones of yellow and red. The first room has big maps giving geographic and political data about Africa, the second slideshows on big screens. The third has hundreds of images, all reproduced snapshot-sized, and stuck seemingly casually to the wall, albeit in serried ranks.

Similar themes play out with variations. Indigenous constructions, often in elaborate works in mud, appear. More often there is colonial architecture – 1930s Italian fascist in Asmara, Eritrea; French fin de siècle in Tunis; or transposed Victorian gothic in former British colonies. After that, global architectural trends – modernism, mirror-glass corporate, postmodernism – are expressed in local ways.

As with flora and fauna, a hot climate tends to encourage more colourful and astonishing forms. Cantilevers are more extravagant, curves and flourishes less constrained. Sometimes, there are preposterous monuments to dictators. There are some shanty towns and modern concrete buildings comprehensively appropriated in ways their architects won't have imagined.

You do, however, have to work quite hard to spot these details, as the eye is dizzied by such a barrage of small images. More than that, the show has a homogenising effect, making these many different cities, thousands of miles apart, merge into a plasticine blur. There's also a lack of depth: cities are always seen with the hasty eye of Adjaye's camera, and there's no digging below the surface, no study of a city's structure or its people.

This is a shame, as Adjaye's travelling is an epic act of homage to a continent. His point is that we should take African cities seriously, but the show doesn't take them seriously enough. The Lagos and Kinshasa studies both argued that African cities, rather than being chaotic disaster zones, have their own patterns and logic, and Adjaye stresses this too, but you don't get the chance to find out what these patterns and logic are.

The show works best as a collection of vignettes and as a way of delivering a message: look at African cities. These things are worth doing, but David Adjaye's monumental act of tourism could lead to so much more.