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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

Royal Shakespeare Theatre will open after three and a half years with major facelift, better seating and more ladies' loos

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, whose doors have been closed for three and a half years for a £112.8m refurbishment, will reopen this November. When it does, according to the Royal Shakespeare Company's artistic director, Michael Boyd, the revamped theatre will provide "the best auditorium for performing Shakespeare anywhere".

For Shakespeare fans, the facelift is long overdue. The old theatre was locally nicknamed "the jam factory" for its industrial appearance, while an unsightly car park ruined its handsome 1930s frontage by architect Elisabeth Scott. "It was," said Rab Bennetts of Bennetts Associates, the architectural practice that has overseen the redevelopment, "a hostile building that turned its back on the town".

And that was before you got inside: some seats were as far as 37 metres away from the stage – a distance that has now halved. The "furthest seat" will remain in situ, in a spot now part of the restaurant, as a reminder of the bad old days.

Female members of the audience, in particular, will have cause to rejoice come November: the number of ladies' lavatories has increased from 19 to 47.

Best of all, the redevelopment will come in on time and on budget, according to Boyd. There is £5m yet to raise, but Vikki Heywood, the RSC's executive director, said she was confident it would come in the next five months from "individuals and charitable trusts to whom we have been talking for a while".

The new theatre, with its high running costs, will open at a time of cuts to public funding of the arts which could be as deep as 25%. Though it is recruiting for jobs with the new theatre, the RSC has frozen pay for existing staff. Boyd said he was hoping the new shop, restaurant, cafe and bar would all provide revenue.

The main theatre and the smaller stage, the Swan, will open to the public from 24 November for visits and one-off events including a version of Shakespeare's sonnets by the director Peter Brook, who created some of his most celebrated productions for the RSC between 1950 and 1970.

In February, full-scale performances will start, with revivals of Rupert Goold's production of Romeo and Juliet, and David Farr's King Lear, with Greg Hicks in the title role. At the Swan, the Irish cabaret singer Camille O'Sullivan will perform a new version of Shakespeare's poem, The Rape of Lucrece. Meanwhile, the temporary auditorium, the Courtyard Theatre, will still be up and running. Opening there in November will be a new musical, Matilda, an adaptation of the Roald Dahl story. Its book is by playwright Dennis Kelly, with lyrics and music by the comic and musician Tim Minchin.

The first large-scale new work to appear on the 1,000-seat main stage from the spring will be announced in November, when the company finalises plans for its 50th anniversary from April 2011 onwards. Aside from (of course) Shakespeare, Boyd said the company would restage some of the plays the company has commissioned over its half-century, mentioning in particular founding director Peter Hall's affinity with the late Harold Pinter.

Boyd said he thought Matilda, A Musical "might have legs, and we hope it will". A show in the West End and even on Broadway would significantly help the RSC through a period of austerity.

In addition, said Boyd, the theatre would "celebrate things that screen art cannot: the desire to witness and share a gathering of a community in real space and real time. And it achieves three dimensions in a way that Hollywood is desperately trying to achieve. We have 3D in our bones."

From barely there buildings to ethereal cloud walks, the Venice Biennale is where architects go to dream

Riding the interminably slow accelerato waterbus to the Venice Architecture Biennale gave me time to stare afresh at the rows of theatrical houses and palaces on parade along the banks of the Grand Canal. If, in your mind's eye, you strip away the flamboyant gothic and Renaissance facades, you are left with rows of four-square brick boxes with big chimneys sitting by the water's edge under the vast skies, which did so much to make Turner's reputation as a visionary artist when he painted them. What you have, then, is a city that represent the four elements: earth (bricks), air (sky), fire (chimneys) and water (canal).

Unconsciously, this was more or less the theme of the 2010 Biennale. In an era of financial paucity and increasing concerns about the sensational waste of our capitalist world, its ever bigger buildings and ever more sprawling cities, I had the feeling that many architects from around the world are trying to get back to basics. Not, that is, to lead us into some austere era of rudimentary design and construction, but to help us think of how we can truly do more with less.

The biennale has been curated by Kazuyo Sejima, one half of the Pritzker prize-winning Japanese practice Sanaa. Given that Sanaa specialise in a form of architecture that might be called ethereal – buildings of great transparency, such as the new Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne, that touch the ground as lightly as possible – this idea of doing more with less, and delightfully so, makes sense. Sejima has named this year's exhibition People Meet in Architecture, which, of course, they do. Yet she seems to be asking what this architecture might be if only it weren't such a slave, as it is at the moment, to overwhelming commercial forces.

The 12th International Architecture exhibition (the first was held in 1980) is a panoramic snapshot showing what architects around the world are thinking beyond and aside from the everyday concerns they have with satisfying clients and wooing planning committees. Held in the Arsenale – the one-time hub of the imperial Venetian navy – and the formal exhibition gardens overlooking the lagoon five minutes' walk away, the Biennale aims to encourage fresh thinking about architecture at a time of economic restraint, environmental fears and yet limitless opportunities. Here, in the dreamiest of all cities, is a rare chance for architects to dream and play, as well as address matter-of-fact issues of how we should be building at the moment. As Sejima said at the opening of the show, "an architecture exhibition is a challenging concept, as actual buildings cannot be exhibited". She continued: "As an architect, I feel it's a part of our profession to use space as a medium to express our thoughts. In this way, the atmosphere of the exhibition will be reached through multiple viewpoints rather than through a single orientation. It's a backdrop for people to relate to architecture, for architecture to relate to people, and for people to relate to themselves."

As if to underline this theme, when I walked into the massive Corderie, the old ropeworks buildings of the Arsenale – where one half of the sprawling biennial exhibition is on show – a team of Japanese architects was busy building a house that was barely there.

They were, they said, "thinking of architecture in the air", whereby "even the structures that give a building its very shape may no longer be clear but, rather, voidlike". I see. Or, rather, I didn't, as the house Junya Ishigami and his colleagues were building is made of what appears to be the finest steel threads. Design drawings of the house on the walls of the ropeworks were so fine as to be all but impossible to interpret. It was as if these diligent architects were building one of Italo Calvino's invisible cities, shaping a structure that might or might not be real.

The fantastical cities which Calvino imagined in Invisible Cities were a homage to Venice itself; the least likely of all cities, fictional or real. Ishigami's installation, Architecture as Air, is a riposte to the idea of building ourselves into a hell of our own making. I like the fact that this house has precise measurements – 14 x 4 x 4 metres – as if it might be built for real, and that it has a structure comprising columns, beams and bracing. Yet these are "indeterminate contours lacking true physical form that dissolve into the transparent space rather than structures supporting the building". At one point, it all threatened to fall down.

Next door is an installation called Cloudscapes by Tetsuo Kondo Architects and Matthias Schuler of Transsolar Klima Engineering. Here, visitors walk up the most delicate steel ramps into artificially generated clouds. This has been done before – notably on the banks of Lake Neuchâtel during the 2002 Swiss Expo by the New York architects Diller + Scofidio – yet there is something delightfully otherworldly in walking with your head in the clouds inside a building. All that is solid melts into water vapour, while architectural preconceptions fumble into a foggy state of indeterminancy. Anything might go.

As if to address this feeling, in another room in the Corderie Serpentine Gallery, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has installed a plethora of video screens on which you can sit and watch and listen to ideas about the future from all the Biennale's participants. Or, you can simply gawp at the scintillating, stroboscopic beauty of the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson's Your Split Second House, a cavernous, dark space in which whip-cracks and writhing snakes of water flash in front of your eyes, hinting at thrilling structures that could never really be, and are gone before your eyes even begin to adjust to their uncertain forms.

These installations – clouds, invisible houses, ephemeral structures – are, I think, successful. Whatever practical relevance they have on the future of what we build is not really their point; they are things of beauty, or ways of making us see with wide-open eyes. What might architecture, and the spaces it shapes and cossets, be like if we could only think about it freely?

A team of Spanish architects, engineers and musicians led by Antón García-Abril and Ensamble Studio suggest it's all a matter of balance; to this effect, they have installed two enormous interecting concrete I-beams across an entire room of the Corderie. These appear to be held in check by a rock and a coil spring, suggesting that the line we walk between self-destruction and a positive future is both delicate and dramatic.

In recent Biennales, curators have been been unable to resist the temptation to create exhibition rooms that feel more like the inside of dense academic tomes (indigestible in the Venetian heat) than installations with immediate visual impact. This year, the idea of creating strong yet simple themes and messages has been carried through from the Arsenale to the Giardini, the public park overlooking the lagoon and the lido, well away from the crowds of St Mark's Square.

This is where many of the national pavilions are found, waving flags for the architectural thinking of countries that have been involved with cultural events in Venice for many decades. Those with a more youthful involvement, whether Croatia or Bahrain, Chile or Korea, peddle their cultural wares in the Arsenale.

The Biennale's Golden Lion award for the best national pavilion has been presented to the Kingdom of Bahrain for a display of three simple fishermen's huts uprooted from the coast of Bahrain for the duration of the Venice show. Entitled Reclaim and curated by architects Noura Al-Sayeh and Fuad Al-Ansari, this is a touching display of a vernacular culture fast disappearing in a part of the world where architectural bombast rules. These shacks are elemental and beautiful.

In the spirit of austerity, the Belgian pavilion shows bits and pieces of the fabric of heavily used office buildings to highlight the notion of durability and the nature of wear and tear. So, stretches of rubber-studded floor vie for attention with worn painted steel handrails. It's rather moving: all those Belgian feet and hands making their imprint on the bulky architecture of the often unlovely contemporary office.

The Dutch present models of empty buildings highlighting the gormless enormity of architectural waste; how we concrete over anywhere we can for short-term gain, while governments prattle on about sustainability and building shortages.

The Hungarian pavilion is a maze of bright yellow school pencils hanging from ceilings by cotton threads. The idea, backed up by touching videos showing architects' hands – young and old – drawing, made the simple point that, although it's undeniably clever, computer-aided design in architecture has done little to make us happier or more human. Drawing remains the guiding genius of buildings that touch us.

"What makes a livable city?" ask the Danes. Behind a yellow banner posing this perennial question sits a Carlsberg dispensing machine that, I suppose, answers the question, especially in a Venice that has been as hot and sticky as molten glue this summer. Inside their pavilion, though, the Danes have new plans for Copenhagen. While these portray happy consumers in baseball caps and high-five-style poses in front of jaw-jutting buildings you hope will never get planning permission, it's easy to see that the city-by-the-water presented here is a kind of would-be Venice, seen through computer screens and digital processes, darkly. If only, the Danes seem to be saying, we could have the excess of our contemporary world in cities as magical as Venice.

Flower cities and giant tigers

The Finns ask us to "stay with the elements" and "close to nature"; the Austrians clearly want us to retain something of the innocence of childhood with models of a city centre, one made of flowers, another straddled by a centrepiece building in the guise of a tiger. The British presentation, curated by Vicky Richardson of the British Council and London architects muf, is more obscure. Its professed hope – that we will learn to respect natural Venice as much as we have drawn from its culture and architecture in the past – is represented by, among other things, excepts from Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and a wooden model of the Olympic stadium currently being built in London.

Much of this Biennale is thoughtful, even wistful stuff, the concerns of generations faced with the absurd contradiction of a desire, on the part of a minority of humans, to lead a "good" life, and the reality of the many grasping for the very cities, buildings and consumer trash that will bring us all to a hot and sticky end.

With a light yet distinctive touch, Kazuyo Sejima has done well to shape an event that raises such issues while still delighting us with installations that hint at something soulful and magical beyond the humourless world of "urban regeneration" and architectural inanity. She brings us back to the elemental in architecture, and finally to the elements themselves.

• This article was amended on 1 September 2010. The original incorrectly described Italo Calvino as a Venetian. This has been deleted.

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."

While impressive GCSE scores at the Barclay school in Stevenage were rightly the main story (Leaking roofs and crumbling classrooms can't halt George and Co's learning surge, 25 August), it's a pity that the piece repeated the pervasive myth that listing always stands in the way of work on a building, whether necessary repairs or alteration to suit changing needs. Many listed schools from every period have been adapted and modernised as educational needs have changed. Recent schemes for listed 20th-century schools, such as Richmond school in Yorkshire and Haggerston school in London, have delivered sensitive and effective refurbishment at a fraction of the cost of a new building, and this would be possible at the Barclay school too. Listing is there to flag up buildings of national special interest, not stand in the way of progress.

Jon Wright

Twentieth Century Society

HG Gillett, who has died aged 102, was an accomplished architect and a devoted family man. He was the father of my former wife, the grandfather of my two daughters and someone whose kindness and friendship I valued for more than 50 years.

Herbert Gornall Gillett was born in Hendon, north-west London, the son of George Gillett, a builder, and his wife Mary (nee Gornall). George was the co-owner of Gillett & Stubbs, which built a number of houses in Hendon, Mill Hill, Golders Green and Kenton, and the chief building inspector for the borough of Hendon.

Herbert attended Hampton grammar school and, after studying architecture at Regent Street polytechnic, became an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects in the 1930s. His first work in that field was in the offices of Sir Edwin Lutyens in Mayfair in the late 1920s.

He joined the architects' department of the London county council (LCC) in 1936 and, apart from the war years, worked in its housing division for the rest of his career.

He participated in civil defence after September 1939 and was a member of a group that designed static water tanks, as well as performing firewatching duties. In 1942, he joined the Royal Engineers with the rank of captain and, after postings to Elgin, in Moray, Scotland, and Anglesey, in north Wales, sailed for India in 1943. He was posted to Lahore and Karachi before being demobilised in late 1945.

He arrived home by Christmas and resumed his career with the LCC in January 1946. He rose to the position of architect grade I and, as such, played an important role in the unprecedented housing effort undertaken by the council in the postwar years.

The projects for which he was architect-in-charge included developments at Putney Heath, Roehampton and Ackroydon, each of which attracted considerable attention in the architectural press. He retired from what was by then the Greater London council in 1972. He remained interested in current affairs into great old age and voted by post in the recent general election.

Herbert was married to Marjorie Cracknell. They had two daughters, Anne and Joan. They were both devoted gardeners and their garden in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, is a surviving testament to their horticultural skills and taste.

Herbert was predeceased by his wife and his younger daughter and is survived by Anne, his grandchildren Emma, Alice and Paul, and seven great-grandchildren.

City council approves plans for tower only metres shorter than iconic landmark

New York's skyline, already immortalised by King Kong and Woody Allen is set to sprout another skyscraper after the city council approved plans for a tower only 18 metres (60ft) shorter than the Empire State Building.

New York city council yesterday shrugged off objections from the owners of the 102-storey Empire State Building and gave the go-ahead for the construction of 15 Penn Plaza, a 67-storey building proposed by Vornado Realty Trust.

The new skyscraper, described by Vornado as "an outstanding addition to New York's skyline", will be built two blocks away from the Empire State Building, which has stood largely unobstructed in midtown Manhattan since 1931.

Building work on 15 Penn Plaza is unlikely to begin until it finds an anchor tenant.

Malkin Holdings, co-owners of the Empire State Building, said they respected the decision of the council, which approved the construction by a vote of 47-1.

"As the current stewards of the Empire State Building, the most iconic image on the skyline of New York, we thought that 15 Penn Plaza was too close to the Empire State Building for its height and design," said the company president, Anthony Malkin.

New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, had dismissed objections to the building.

"Anybody that builds a building in New York City changes its skyline. We don't have to run around to every other owner and apologise," he told a news conference on Tuesday.

"One guy owns a building and he'd like to have it be the only tall building. I'm sorry, that's not the real world."

David Greenbaum, the project developer for 15 Penn Plaza, told New York city council's zoning committee that the tower's height was determined by the needs of potential tenants – such as financial services firms that need large, uninterrupted floors to accommodate trading activities – as well as the additional space needed for "green" office design.

Vornado said the project would bring transport improvements, including a concourse linking Penn station to subways and commuter trains, new subway entrances and an expanded subway platform.

Penn Plaza will be 363 metres (1,190ft) tall. The Empire State Building's main structure is 381 metres but it has a 62 metre antenna that puts its total height at 443 metres.

Mitchell Moss, a New York University urban policy professor and an informal adviser to the mayor, told the New York Times that the city had long cherished its soaring towers.

"People don't come to New York to visit caves," Moss said. "They want the views, the height, the experience of tall buildings. Skyscrapers allow us to make the best use of a limited amount of land."

The Empire State Building won its place in popular culture in the 1933 film King Kong, when a giant, love-sick ape climbed the skyscraper, Fay Wray clutched in his paw, only to fall to earth in a hail of bullets from a bi-plane.

It was the city's tallest building until the construction of the World Trade Centre in 1970. After the twin towers were destroyed in the September 11 attacks, the Empire State Building again held the title of New York's tallest building, but will lose it when One World Trade Centre is completed.

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

Originally published in the Guardian on 14 August 1991

The Prince of Wales has resigned as president of the patrons of the National Museums of Scotland in a furore reminiscent of the "monstrous carbuncle" saga, because he was not sufficiently consulted over architectural plans for the new Museum of Scotland.

Buckingham Palace said yesterday the prince had twice warned the organisation that he would relinquish the post if a competition to design the new building was not changed. The prince, who favours the neo-classical style of architecture, is thought to have wanted more public consultation on the building which will adjoin the existing museum in Edinburgh's Chambers Street.

His resignation was timed to coincide with the announcement of the winning plans and is being interpreted as a criticism of the six shortlisted entries, all of which he saw. Announcing the winner of the competition yesterday, the Marquess of Bute said the timing was "less than ideal." He added that the prince's heavy commitments had made it difficult to consult him regularly on the project.

The prince served as the patrons' president for 18 months. A persistent critic of modern architects, he complained in 1984 that plans for a new extension to the National Gallery looked like a "monstrous carbucle on the face of an elegant and much loved friend." Three months later they were dropped.

Dr Sheila Brock, director of public relations, said: "The prince obviously felt he didn't have the opportunity to comment all the way through. I wouldn't say I am surprised and we are not fazed by it."

The competition for the contract attracted 371 entries. The prince is unlikely to approve of the winning design by the Scottish architect Gordon Benson and the Newcastle-born Alan Forsyth. Unlike the new Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery designed to blend into its environment and of which the prince approves, the £25 million building will stand out in the sombre Chambers Street as one of the city's most innovative and modern.

To be built in stone, it looks like an industrial factory, with windows resembling gunports and a turret half way up. It will prove a direct contrast with the existing museum, a quasi-classical construction built last century. The building will display many Scottish objects now in storage and is due to open in 1996.

Joanna Coles

These archive extracts are compiled by members of the Guardian's research and information department. Email: research.department@guardian.co.uk

City takes out legal action over ownership of Jacob Wrey Mould's landmark designs found in a skip 50 years ago

At some point in the 1950s a craftsman called Buckley was working on a site in lower Manhattan when he came across a stash of papers dumped in a skip. They were a set of architectural drawings in watercolours of plans for city parks including details of fountains, clocks, terraces and other structures.

What probably caught Buckley's eye was the stately nature of the designs and their elaborate colouring. Recognising their innate value, he took a pile of more than 100 of the drawings home and filed them away for safe keeping.

More than 50 years later they have become the subject of a $1m (£640,000) lawsuit lodged at the New York supreme court. The legal action was brought by the city's authorities against the late craftsman's son, Sam Buckley, and Christie's, the auctioneers through whom he tried to sell the drawings.

They were the work of Jacob Wrey Mould, a British architect who came to New York in 1853 to design a Unitarian church in Fourth Avenue and 20th Street. Though the building has long been pulled down, in its day it was quite a sensation with its striped facade of red and cream stone earning it the nickname Church of the Holy Zebra.

Mould, an irascible man who was not much liked but greatly admired, went on to collaborate with Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park. Together they planned the original buildings of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while Mould also had a large hand in Belvedere Castle and the carvings of the Bethesda Terrace, both in Central Park. Later, he was seminal in the creation of other quintessential New York features such as Morningside and Riverside Parks.

Most of the drawings were signed by Mould. They display his love of vibrant colours as a student of the designer and polychrome theorist Owen Jones with whom he designed a room in Buckingham Palace. They include plans for structures that were built, such as Bethesda Fountain, as well as ones that were not – a set of street lamps for Park Avenue, for instance.

Every one was stamped with the badge of the New York Parks Department, for whom Mould worked from 1857 to shortly before his death in 1886.

When Christie's was commissioned by the younger Buckley to sell 86 of the 127 drawings in his late father's possession, the auction house contacted the city authorities for help with valuing the works and to ask whether New York wanted the first chance to buy them.

But the city saw an invaluable historic collection that should never have left its public ownership.

"They are the kind of thing we would never throw away, but for whatever reason they were erroneously discarded or lost," said Gerald Singleton, the lawyer representing the city. "Once we looked at them we realised that the city remains the owner of these drawings."

It has persuaded the New York court to put a preliminary restraining order that prevents Buckley or Christie's from selling any of the drawings.

In return, the city has promised to back off from its legal threats and to attempt to reach a settlement.

"We're confident this will end amicably," Singleton said.

If New York regains the drawings, it has pledged to use them when renovating historic parts of the city.

Lucille Gordon, Mould's biographer, said the documents were also hugely important in the understanding of the architect himself. "He is a piece of our history – his work is scattered all over New York state. Yet so few papers of any kind have been left behind, and any scrap that Mould touched has a value."

Jacob Wrey Mould

Born 1825 in Bloomsbury in London, and educated at King's College School.

Studied under Owen Jones, the so-called master of polychromy, travelling to the Alhambra in Spain.

Took part in the building of Dorchester House on Park Lane and in the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, moving to New York soon afterwards.

Started work with the city's park department in 1857, rising by 1870 to be its architect-in-chief.

Apart from a five-year stint in Lima in Peru from 1874, he spent most of his later life working for the New York parks.

Also renowned as a distinguished pianist and organist.