This is village living all right, but just a little bit later in the 21st century. The first thing you must know is that this is not the countryside, but part of the city. A good thing too because - second vital fact - this means that it does not have to sprawl sideways across the green fields of England. Instead, it goes straight up in the air. A cluster of three slender towers, oval in shape, shooting skywards, containing all the population and rather more than the usual amenities of your average dormitory village. Is this like the tower blocks of the past? Only in being tall. Everything else has been re-invented. This is the world of Skyhouse.

Skyhouse is the concept of architects David Marks and Julia Barfield. They have some impressive track record when it comes to reinventing old ideas. They took the century-old idea of the Ferris Wheel, completely redesigned it on contemporary lines and - voila - the hugely successful London Eye was born. Moreover, this husband-and-wife partnership is canny. Unlike most architects, they did not just design something for others to get rich by. They kept control of the London Eye. Along with British Airways and the Tussauds Group, they are part of the company that operates it. But Marks and Barfield, both still on the young side, want to do rather more than that in their lives. They want to reform the way we think about housing in Britain. They have a mission.

The way they go about promoting Skyhouse is very like the way they promoted the Eye. Everybody scoffed at that, too, at first. People said it was an old idea, profoundly unoriginal, that nobody would be interested, that it would be a tacky fairground attraction, unworthy of a site in London right by County Hall, close to the Palace of Westminster. Quietly and doggedly, Marks and Barfield pursued their project, never giving up, fine-tuning their design, getting it built (with some heart-stopping moments) seeing it become a huge success, then campaigning - again successfully - to have its short-term licence turned into a long-term one. The Eye is like the Eiffel Tower, which itself was originally a privately-financed and highly controversial enterprise. As for tackiness, that works both ways. Today the sophisticated modern lines of the Eye show up County Hall, once the dignified seat of London Government, for the cheap bazaar it has somehow been allowed to become.

So this is a pair of architect/entrepreneurs it would be well to take seriously. The arguments against Skyhouse sound familiar: an old, discredited idea (high-rise living) unsuitable for sensitive sites etc…no wonder, having weathered all this with the Eye, the wonderfully calm David (tall, slow-talking) and the slightly more excitable Julia (small, fast-talking) reckon they are onto a winner. It's an unpardonable pun, but they are not trying to reinvent the wheel: instead, they have set out to design a better wheel. As with the Eye, they have rolled out their idea in phases. The initial idea and design, to test response. The refined, relaunched design with some real sites in mind. Now, variations of the design, at various scales, for some very interested parties. And all backed up with research. David in particular is big on research.

When you sit in the glass-walled meeting room of the Marks/Barfield studio in Clapham - a former snooker hall, once in a rough bit of town, now a genteel district of upmarket shops, coffee bars and restaurants - you get a bit of an oblique presentation. It starts, not with a yummy computer-generated image of Skyhouse, but with two maps of England. The maps show the relationship between the country's urban/noisy areas and rural/tranquil areas in the early 1960s and the early 1990s respectively. Over that 30 years you see the tendrils of urban sprawl expanding and thickening across the countryside to a quite alarming extent. They do not need to point out that we are now ten years on from there, and the big housing onslaught, as presaged by the forecasts of John Prescott and economist Kate Barker, is still to come.