In my piece unpacking Brian Eno’s design principles for for our Swedish street mission, I suggested, as an aside, that “it feels like landscape architecture, having been unfairly downplayed for decades, perhaps for obvious if unfortunate reasons, may increasingly be the most important strand of architecture moving forward, for those same reasons, reversed.”

In landscape architecture, we see a practice attuned to biodiverse environments, integrated systems and cultures, ongoing and adaptive long-term engagement, multi-species or more-than-human-centred design, and more besides. Downplaying these practices in the past means we must focus on them now.

Yet that history is littered with shining…

Planning, designing, and managing cities in Sweden can be a largely joyless, technocratic affair, dominated by efficiency-oriented engineering, economic and managerial sensibilities. Although the Swedish state continues to fund arts and culture at a level that would make many other countries green with envy, it tends to keep those practices and perspectives quite separate from questions of city planning, governance, and even design. This is far from unusual, of course, but it is perhaps heightened in the highly pragmatic Nordic countries, their governance cultures reconstituted for New Public Management.

So one of the many ideas I wanted to test within…

Admittedly, it’s drawing a long bow to see anything in common between the megacity sprawled along the Honshu coastline and a tiny island at the outer edge of the Stockholm archipelago. They may as well be the product of entirely different species, despite the allusions to shared sensibilities between Nippon and the Nordics.

Yet on a brief trip to Sandhamn, a day after posting about the Small Vehicles of Tokyo, I found myself reflecting on how another island—albeit one about 27 hectares big with only a few hundred permanent inhabitants—had also produced a fine diversity of small vehicles to get…

Unusually for me, this is a post with little in the way of context. Rather, it is simple, recorded observation. As part of an endless enquiry into what makes good streets tick, over four short visits to Tokyo in 2018 and 2019—during The Days In Which We Flew—I started cataloguing ‘the small vehicles of Tokyo’, recognising them as an ingredient of the city’s beguiling street condition.

ArkDes are quietly building one of the Sweden’s more interesting spaces out of one of Sweden’s least interesting spaces

Sitting outside one of Stockholm’s primary cultural complexes, the space known as Exercisplan has previous lives that would have been defined by display, ritual and ceremony. It was once a parade ground, when the island of Skeppsholmen was largely allocated to military use. But now it is an entirely blank space, an unlovely, unloved square of asphalt, essentially as if car park, yet awkwardly acting as the entrance to the Swedish National Centre for Architecture and Design (ArkDes) and one of the country’s preeminent galleries (Moderna Museet).

The vagaries of public administration mean that, as far as anyone can tell…

Ed. This is a re-cut of one of my early Dezeen columns, originally published there on 18 October 2013, but I thought I’d dig it out and re-publish a modified version here, given the current debates about education and learning environments, spaces and technologies in the context of Covid-19, and of course the long-running deeper currents that the pandemic has highlighted. I've tweaked a bit, but in looking back on it eight years on, the fundamental questions didn't need to change much. The focus on asynchronous 'MOOCs' (very much of its time; the New York Times had called 2012 The…

Does anyone have information about this Fiat advert from the early nineteen-seventies? I found it reproduced in the extraordinary 1974 book Human Space Utopia (Penguin) by the great English anarchist writer Colin Ward (also author of the stone-cold classic The Child in the City—and read Shumi Bose on that.)

The crisp Krone-esque copy and layout typical of the time is actually difficult unpick. It either conveys either a wilful disregard (“Our job is simply to sell what people buy without questioning the morality of that”) or a broader care for the environment (“As a car manufacturer, we know that cars…

Ever since the President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, dropped the idea of a New European Bauhaus into her State of the Union speech on 16th September 2020, I’ve been discussing it with members of the European Commission team working on the proposal. …