This majestic expressionist 20s office building shows the complexity and beauty which can be derived from a single brick and a single window. (You can fit 400 flats in it too…)

Gehry’s art gallery gave birth to the ‘Bilbao effect’: the lifting of a challenged area through the sheer power of iconic architecture. Did adding housing to this mix work for Rotterdam and Hamburg?

‘The problem with delivering a lot more new housing in crowded cities is that they don’t make new land you know.’ Or do they…?

A ‘human zoo’ is the only way of describing Funenpark: a series of unique pavilions set in a parkland with no streets and teeming with pedestrian activity. Could English residents ever live in this public way?

Gating estates can be controversial: but perhaps the ability to do it, even if only at night, can give residents occasional freedom to enjoy their shared space more freely?

Grafting large new communities on to existing cities is a sensible way to add more homes: but communicating that to existing citizens is a fine art. Utrecht shows the way.

Living in an icon can be surprisingly simple: you just have to learn to love giant flower pots and pendant lamps.

Artist communities are rich with potential for communal activity, but also for gentrification: what if people don’t want to join in?

Fancy cleaning the common areas where you live twice a year? And doing the gardening? What about sorting the rubbish out? It’s a step too far for a lot of people, but not for these co-housing pioneers…

Elephant’s regen story is long, complicated and highly political. This is a short crit of the successful spatial quality of an early phase, enhanced through the retention of mature trees from its 1960s past.