The redesigned extension to the Tate Modern contemporary art museum in London, launched today, shows Jacques Herzog moving from what would effectively have been a built diagram of stacked boxes - his first attempt of two years ago - into something considerably more smoothly sculpted. It's turning into architecture. He has also abandoned the somewhat quixotic glass cladding to his Mark One scheme - this is to be a south-facing building, remember - in favour of a considerably subtler perforated brick skin. Homage is thus duly paid to the brickiness of the existing Tate Modern - originally a post-war oil-fired power station designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott..... (18 June) full article

I'm sitting opposite Frank Gehry over breakfast in an impossibly pretty sunlit town square in Arles, Provence. He's here to launch the plans for his "Parc des Ateliers" project, described as a cultural Utopia. But I'm staring at a set of squiggles he's just drawn in my notebook, and wondering if I should ask him to sign them. He'd reached for a pen, as architects in conversation do, and started sketching away. "I'm doing these pop-up stores for Bono," he explains. "They're for his Product Red company. I'm really excited by them. They're like pieces of jigsaw." So he draws a piece of jigsaw, slowly and carefully. Simple enough. (15 July) full article

Nobody ever says - hey, let's go to the Hayward Gallery, the way they do of the Tate or the National Gallery or any museum. Apart from having no permanent display, the Hayward is strangely invisible, considering how powerful its Brutalist 1960s South Bank architecture is. It is not a marketable brand. So is it an insanely rash move for director/curator Ralph Rugoff to ask artists to respond to this gritty building in celebration of the Hayward Gallery's 40th birthday? No, it is not. Artists being alchemists, they have turned the weird concrete monolith into a palace of intriguing follies. "Psycho Buildings" is a brilliant title for a show that deserves to be one.... (11 June) full article

You just can't get rid of some architects. If they're successful, everyone wants to use them. The older they get, the more in demand they are. It was true in the past of America's Frank Lloyd Wright and France's Le Corbusier, it's true today of America's Frank Gehry, Italy's Renzo Piano, Britain's Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. This has always been an art where wide acceptance comes relatively late in life - though the current crop of septuagenarians are striplings compared with Oscar Niemeyer, creator of Brasilia, who is incredibly still working at 100. Even so, we're now at a pause moment. What on earth comes next? The problem is most acute here in Britain, because in Britain.... (11 May) full article

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