How tragically apt. London's Victoria and Albert Museum mounts an exhibition on Chinese design culture, and Tibet erupts in flames. In a further irony, the crowds of protestors gather outside the Royal Institute of British Architects, which happens to be across the road from the Chinese embassy. But the architects are having a heated debate, too: the international big names are arguing whether it is ethical to take fat fees from China. It's a bit late for that, really. Western architecture long ago made its Faustian pact with the Eastern Empire. Now comes the payback. And this is the great unstated underlying theme of "China Design Now" at the V&A.....(30 March) full article

The big draw in Liverpool until recently was the photo-realist artist Ben Johnson who you would find in the Walker art gallery, six days a week, completing his giant aerial view of the city. As Johnson did his stuff with airbrush and stencils, he chatted with the fluctuating crowd of fascinated onlookers, most of whom wanted to know if their home was somewhere on the 16 foot by 8 foot canvas. That was easy: more difficult was that he also had to forecast the future. Johnson is painting a city (he's still at it, now on webcam only) with big gaps missing. He has to refer to architects' drawings. He is finishing their buildings before they can. ou'll know, I expect, that Liverpool is Europe's Capital of Culture this year. (18 March) full article

Talk to any dogmatic modernist architect - there are still plenty to be found - and you will quickly find the inner functionalist. Questions of style, of beauty, are brushed aside as irrelevant or tangential. Everything has to answer to a remorseless logic, carried through in every detail. We are led to believe that the end product - the finished building - is the best possible, indeed the only possible, outcome of a rigorously thorough design procedure. This is arrant nonsense, of course, as evidenced by today's multi-millionaire breed of random shape-generating "icon" architects. Function and form have less and less to do with each other.... (10 March) full article

You could argue that Sir Colin Alexander ("Sandy") St. John Wilson, who died late last year aged 85, was just a little too intellectual for his own good. That as an architect and academic, he was over-referential, particularly to his Scandinavian-modern heroes. Theory does tend to drag at the heels of the practising architect. With rare exceptions such as Le Corbusier who could write a manifesto before lunch, design a masterpiece building such as the Villa Savoie or Ronchamp chapel in the afternoon, and then get down to some serious skirt-chasing in the evening, I'd say that it is better to design first, and let others do the theorising on your behalf. (27 February) full article

Airports are about rather more than the design of check-in desks and departure lounges. They are about the design of whole cities, whole nations. So let's get one thing straight. Any new building at Heathrow - even one that is effectively a complete new airport in itself, namely the massive new Terminal Five, opening in March - can only ever be a temporary fix. Everybody knows that the airport is in the wrong place, that it is too small, and that the noise, pollution and danger of forcing planes to fly low right over the capital will get steadily more unacceptable. Eventually, Heathrow will have to close. The uncomfortable fact is that we will have to build a new airport way out... (5 February) full article