Oliver Wainwright
Oliver Wainwright is the Guardian's architecture and design critic. Trained as an architect, he has worked for a number of practices, both in the UK and overseas, and written extensively on architecture and design for many international publications. He is also a visiting critic at several architecture schools
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Venice architecture biennale pavilions – a souped-up pre-school playgroundUruguay opens a swap shop, Australia makes a splash with its pool while Germany and Austria’s pavilions tackle the refugee crisis with varying success – the architectural equivalent of a UN summit is as kooky and curious as ever
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SFMOMA's new extension – a gigantic meringue with a hint of IkeaThanks to a new building designed by Snøhetta, the San Francisco gallery has more floorspace than MoMA – but the marriage of old and new is not a happy one
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'No sketching': V&A; signs betray everything the museum stands forNo visit should be complete without tripping over a skinny-jeaned student clutching a sketchbook. This draconian diktat denies visitors their art education
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Swiss architecture's star double act: 'We're all about Dinghaftigkeit!'From a zigzag extension in Zurich to Basel’s new Kunstmuseum, Christ & Gantenbein’s projects mix the ancient and modern in beguiling ways
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Smartypants: the fart-filtering future of underwearWe live in an age of undies innovation: from self-medicating bras to briefs that smell of breakfast or hide a weapon (and that’s not even a euphemism)
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Zaha Hadid: creator of ambitious wonders – and a fair share of blundersIn her best buildings the laws of physics appear suspended, while other designs struggle when forced to meet reality
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Story of cities #4: Beijing and the earliest planning document in historyThe seemingly incoherent sprawl of modern Beijing is based on meticulous plans to bind citizens together under imperial rule. Conceived as a means of enforcing social order, the impact of planning remains strong in the city today
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A tale of two cities: winners and losers in London's social housing divideIn one part of London, residents are being bulldozed out of council-built homes to make way for a privately led development most cannot afford. But elsewhere in the capital, a radical scheme is putting residents in control
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A long way down: the nightmare of JG Ballard's towering visionThe 1975 novel High-Rise depicted an apocalyptic tower that drove its inhabitants insane. As a new film adaptation hits cinemas, we wonder what the author would have made of today’s rash of skyscrapers for the megarich
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Two pools, 13 bathrooms and 300 for dinner: the modernist fun palaces of Palm SpringsIn the 1950s, Hollywood decamped to the desert – bankrolling the world’s most daring modernist architects to create ever more experimental boltholes. Welcome to a world of Martian landing pads, clifftop Bond lairs and Flintstones sofas
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Blavatnik School of Government: a corporate temple among Oxford's dreaming spiresTate Modern architects Herzog & de Meuron have designed a stately new faculty that holds its own against the Radcliffe Camera. But can a hermetically sealed building bankrolled by an oligarch be truly democratic?
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Serpentine pavilion 'unzipped': first look at Bjarke Ingels' designThe Danish architect offers a sculptural space ‘like a mountain of ice cubes’ stretching across the London gallery’s lawn, to be complemented by four radical summer houses
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Bjarke Ingels to design 2016 Serpentine pavilion – but he's not the only oneJulia Peyton-Jones’s swansong as gallery director includes four more summer houses in Kensington Gardens, designed by architects aged between 36 and 93
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Creation from Catastrophe review – architectural vision from the ashesAn ambitious snapshot of three centuries of floods, fires, earthquakes and tsunamis – and how architects have helped (or cashed in) after calamities
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'The dictator who failed to dictate': free-range architecture under Mussolini