Listen to the locals

If nearly every venerable architect in the host country slams your proposed design for a building as a “monumental mistake” and a “disgrace to future generations”, it’s probably a good idea to reconsider. Not so Zaha Hadid, who, after facing calls for her Tokyo Olympic stadium to be scrapped – following a petition of 32,000 signatures and an open letter of opposition from a host of eminent Japanese architects – simply accused the locals of jealousy. “I think it’s embarrassing for them,” she said. “I understand it’s their town, but they’re hypocrites. The fact that they lost [the competition] is their problem.”

Ration your icons

Designs by Norman Foster (left), BIG (centre) and Frank Gehry (right) converge in front of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Battersea Power Station, London. Photograph: BIG

“You’ll have two icons sat side by side. What could be better than that?” So asked Rob Tincknell, the man in charge of the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station, before unveiling his plan to build an architectural petting zoo around Giles Gilbert Scott’s brick cathedral of electricity. The power station-reborn-as-mall will be reached along a “high street” (AKA a gauntlet of luxury apartments), with a wiggling glass worm by Norman Foster on one side and a scrunched-up metal flower by Frank Gehry on the other, terminating in a big swoopy hole scooped out by Danish funsters, BIG. It’s the kind of car crash of competing icons that might make you wish the place had been left as a majestic ruin.



Forget facets

Shardenfreude … 62 Buckingham Gate in Victoria, London, by Pelli Clarke Pelli architects. Photograph: Land Securities

Since the Shard broke on to the London skyline as a dazzling crystal spear, many have been the lesser buildings that have tried to emulate its fractured facets with the odd bit of wonky glass hung askew. The city is now littered with crumpled glazing and angular floor-plates terminating in useless acute angles. These are not “urban jewels”, nor do they “reflect a vision of a multi-faceted world”. They’re ugly hulks with shoddy details – those ambitious multi-angled joints usually bodged with a splurge of mastic – and the result just looks like something went wrong with a Sketch-Up computer model, the whole thing triangulated to oblivion. If in doubt, keep it orthogonal in 2015.



Say no to facadectomies

Death mask … Lilian Knowles House in Spitalfields, London. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright

Here’s an idea for a makeover. Why not flay the skin off a supermodel and stretch it over your own body? You might have difficulty seeing, given that your eye-holes probably won’t match up, and you might not be able to breathe through that misplaced mouth, but no matter. You’ll look great. And you can apply the same idea to your buildings. The six-storey 300-room student accommodation block you’re planning might not fit behind that nice four-storey Victorian brick frontage, but what the hell. You can squeeze it in. They’re only students. They won’t realise that their windows look out on to a blank brick wall and that they can’t fully open their front door. And the conservation officer will give you extra Brownie points for retaining a beloved heritage asset. Win win.

Make entrances equal

Left, the luxury lobby of One Commercial Street in Aldgate, marketed to wealthy City workers. Right, the side-alley entrance reserved for affordable housing tenants. Photograph: Photographs: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Time was when the lord of the manor went in through the front door and his lesser servant-serfs went in round the back. But the chances are that the apartment block you’re designing isn’t the new set of Downton Abbey, so there’s really no excuse for specifying a “poor door”. If your housing association client insists on the affordable housing units having a separate entrance for maintenance reasons, then at least design it on equal terms as the market-rate housing and don’t hide it down a service alley next to the bins.



Design dumb cities

Do smart cities make dumb citizens? Photograph: Mmdi/Getty

The all-seeing mod-cons of our “smart cities” have revolutionised urban management and streamlined the provision of municipal services, filling our streets with brave battalions of crime-fighting lampposts and fleets of eavesdropping dustbins. But does the smart city really empower the citizen to be any more than a passive consumer of services and generator of data, to be harvested and redeployed in the name of urban efficiency? And when the mechanics of urban governance may be subcontracted to Siemens and Cisco, what happens to the principle of democratic accountability? It simply goes the same way as the outsourced “easyCouncil” in Barnet – where no matter who the locals vote for in the next elections, they will get Capita. So keep your cities lo-fi in 2015.



Don’t design with Lego

This is what happens when architects design with Lego. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris for the Guardian

The Danish click-together brick has long been hailed as a source of inspiration for budding architects, providing children with the means to develop their megalomaniacal tendencies and construct miniature universes on the sitting room floor. But Lego is a cunning brand, and has recently sought to monetise the increasingly the lucrative Afol (adult fans of Lego) market, with the launch of the Lego Architecture Studio, an expensive set of all-white bricks aimed at architect grownups. It might be a fun desk toy, but it is not a design tool – and it will only serve to continue the wretched trend of clunky “pixelated” buildings propagated by certain Dutch practices and their cutester offspring.

Build better towers

From left: the Helix by Make, the Quill by Sparrc; the Odalisk by CZWG. Photograph: PR

London’s recent spate of high-rise buildings has prompted a vociferous anti-tower backlash, seeing the Observer and the Architect’s Journal launch a skyline campaign to protect the city’s precious silhouette. Truth is, skylines are not to be preserved in aspic, nor is London’s horizon a particularly magnificent example: the hallowed dome of St Paul’s has long been crowded out by a motley collection of lumps and stumps. The truly alarming thing is just how bad the current clutch of high-rise design proposals is, each trying harder than the next to outshine its neighbours with ever more elaborate peaks and kaleidoscopic cladding treatments, with no idea how to meet the ground or create a meaningful urban street. 2015 will only see more towers, so make sure they make elegant and intelligent contributions to the city.

Defend the meaning of public space

The square beneath Richard Rogers’ Leadenhall Building, AKA the Cheesegrater tower, is managed by Broadgate Estates, the company that evicted protesters from Paternoster Square. Photograph: Sonja Horsman

What could be a better symbol of civic life than a nice public space? In planning terms, it is held up a de facto good, the ameliorating salve between the closed footprints of private development. Yet, increasingly, it is no such thing. It is more often an extension of the private realm – an office lobby without walls, a mall atrium without a roof – owned by a private developer and managed solely in their interests. Even publicly-owned urban space is now mostly controlled by private agencies: the relentless growth of business improvement districts (BIDs) sees public funds from Section 106 agreements syphoned off and spent by the unaccountable boards of local businesses. If trees and benches prevent the flow of people into the shops and encourage anti-social loitering then, in the eyes of the BID, it’s better not to have them. Reclaim the idea of truly civic space in 2015.

More gardens and bridges … but not a garden bridge

The garden bridge … ‘neither a garden nor a bridge’. Photograph: Arup/EPA

What’s not to like about a garden on a bridge? The Garden Bridge Trust that is managing the project says it could provide “the chance to walk through woodlands over one of the greatest rivers in the world,” a “quick and beautiful route” for commuters and “for dreamers, a quiet place to linger among trees and grasses to look at the views”. Well, there’s the fact that it is another private-public space, that it is being built with £60m of public money; that it will be inaccessible to unregistered groups, cyclists and closed at night. Or that long-cherished views will be blocked; that there will be unbearable crowds along the South Bank at peak times; or that the planning permission has been questioned by the barristers of Middle Temple. Or perhaps that we might be paying for the upkeep of this private attraction for years to come. Will a spotlight finally be shone on the murky processes behind the mayor’s vanity projects in 2015?