Curated by independent writer, editor and curator Elias Redstone, the series of original images by photographer Theo Simpson documents overlooked buildings and infrastructure, including an oil refinery jetty, a bus garage and a cemetery.

The ten colour offset prints are on display in the Design Museum's Café and Tank space until 22 July and have been compiled in a journal published by Theo Simpson and graphic designer Ben Mclaughlin's publishing company, Mass Observation.

We recently published a set of photographs by Alastair Philip Wiper of the world's largest solar furnace and wave-reflecting chambers and Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers documented a series of World War Two monuments in Yugoslavia.

See more photography projects on Dezeen »
See all stories about the Design Museum »

Here is a selection of photographs from the exhibition, with the explanatory texts from the critics:

Sam Jacob of FAT, a regular contributor to Dezeen's opinion column, nominated Welbeck Street Car Park in Marlyebone.

Its neighbour is buried beneath Cavendish Square; modern necessity camouflaged beneath apparent historicism. But Welbeck Street is qualmless, a multistory car park celebrating itself as though it were the crowning glory of civilisation. Designed for Debenhams in 1971, it sits like a block-sized sculpture, its elongated diamond-shaped prefabricated concrete panels locked together into mesmeric and scaleless pattern that genuflects to the oddities of its historical boundary.

It is part of a small gang, a batch of buildings produced in a small window when car parks were treated as civic monuments, significant structures that expressed the modernity of the moment. This moment saw a coincidence of the tail end of brutalism and the megastructure along with enthusiasms for grand infrastructural highway planning.

Of course all of those things – cars, architecture, planning, concrete – soon found themselves if not blamed for the collapse of society at least tarnished with doubt, falling on the wrong side of every contemporary ideological debate.

Blampied's architecture explores and expresses the possibilities of the multistory car park. Its frame remains open to the elements, a giant grill that ventilates fumes from the buildings interior while also, perhaps, referring to a cars radiator grill. It is simultaneously practical and symbolic. Its rawness casts it as part of the infrastructural landscape: highway engineered into vertical stack. But here infrastructure is handled with such delicacy that all its rawness is elevated to sublime beauty.

Welbeck Street Car Park should be regarded along with other great structures occurring at the intersection of transport and architecture, alongside Gilbert Scott's St Pancras, Brunel's train sheds and Grand Central Station. It also stands as a template for a problem that is not going to disappear any time soon. The building acts as an interface between cars and the city. It resolves this often troubling relationship beautifully, a structure for cars articulated as a fully urban phenomenon.

Tom Dyckhoff of the BBC Culture Show selected Berthold Lubetkin's Bevin Court flats.

It felt a little like the white rabbit falling down the hole in Alice in Wonderland; only we fell up. It was the mid-1990s. We were at university, on an architecture field trip, trudging past Islington's Farrow & Ball-ed brick townhouses and cappuccino-selling cafes (flat whites hadn’t been invented yet). Yuppies. We still called them yuppies, then.

Our tutor was a Marxist; he was having none of this. He marched his comrades, who, by now, were looking a little green with envy, down Percy Street (more posh townhouses), turned right, ta-dah! Oh... Is that it? A block of flats. And…? Designed by Berthold Lubetkin in the 1950s, we obediently scribbled in our notebooks. Yes, we get the message: we bothered to build homes for the proletariat back then.

It was originally to be called Lenin Court, containing a statue of the Soviet leader, until geopolitics shifted. Very interesting. But, basically, so what? Still not as nice as those Georgian houses. He continued: "Council cut the budget, usual story, so Lubetkin scaled back the ambition. Apart from..."

Our tutor opened the block's little entrance door. That one single act will stay with me till I die. It was as if our tutor had slipped us all a tab of acid. We walked in and entered... what? Another universe. Another dimension. Whoosh. That staircase! Now, most staircases in postwar blocks of flats are nothing to write home about. This one, though, was plucked from an Escher print. We scampered up, dizzy, eyes wide open. Imagine coming home from work to this. Imagine popping out for a pint of milk. Going to school. Those Georgian houses didn’t have a staircase like this. Our tutor smiled. This was what architecture was all about. We got the message.

The Cabmen’s Shelter that provided refreshments to Victorian horse-drawn cab drivers was chosen by Oliver Wainwright of The Guardian.

Looking like a cross between a quaint country cricket pavilion and a large garden shed, the Cabmen's Shelter is an enigmatic part of the London streetscape. With its green-painted timber panelled walls, pitched tiled rooftop and decorative air vent poking out of the top, it squats at the side of the road like an emerald Tardis, waiting to transport you back to Victorian London.

There are only 13 of these mysterious structures left, scattered from Chelsea Embankment to Russell Square, all of which are now Grade II listed, but at their height there were over 60 across the city, built at a cost of £200 each. They were the product of the Cabmen's Shelter Fund, established in 1875 by the philanthropic Earl of Shaftesbury to provide "good and wholesome refreshments at moderate prices" for London's army of horse-drawn cab drivers – of which there were 4,600 by 1869.

Law stated that cabbies could not leave their horse and cab at the stand unattended, so they had to pay someone to keep watch if they wanted to go for a break. Providing a place to rest at the head of the taxi rank, the shelters solved this problem. Occupying a place on the public highway, their dimensions could be no larger than the size of a hansom cab and its steed – that is "seven bays long by three bays wide".

Built partly to tempt cabbies away from the pub, the shelters had a moralistic bent: each displays a sign declaring that gambling, swearing and political discussion is strictly forbidden, and alcohol cannot be served. Inside, there is space for 12 people, sitting on benches that run along both walls around a u-shaped Formica-topped table, hinged at the end to allow you to squeeze in. In the corner, an impossibly small kitchen serves up strong tea – and some of the best bacon sarnies in London.

Owen Hatherley of The Guardian nominated an oil refinery jetty in Canvey Island on the Thames estuary.

Canvey Island was 'oil city', a seaside town with a massive sideline in the petrochemical industry. The exceptionally long, spindly, worn jetty that was once part of the Occidental Petroleum site is both a remnant of and currently provides a view of one of the least commented-on but most astonishing 'unknown architectures' around – the buildings of the petrochemical industry, here more specifically, the Coryton refinery in Essex.

Anonymous and hardly even strictly definable as 'architecture', refineries are among the most dreamlike and complex things in the built environment, usually placed at a safe distance from actual cities, the sort of zones where the real workings of the economy, and the structures that house them, can be seen. Refineries themselves are the unacknowledged architectural inspiration for the Lloyds building and much else, bafflingly intricate steel structures made up of dozens of little towers, protrusions and connections, which have a spectacular sense of sheer spatial exuberance and a total lack of the cowardice of so much actual architecture.

Pick a refinery, it doesn't matter which – Wilton, Fawley, or Canvey, where the beach and the jetty provide a view of a site that was mostly established by Mobil in the 1950s; the village of Coryton was razed for the purpose. By day, refineries are stunning enough, but  lit up at night, each one is a pocket metropolis, a constructivist's dream of steel, flares and flashing lights, from a distance much more impressive a skyline than many actual cities. Therein, these all-but-illegible, bafflingly complex structures are processing our increasingly irrational oil economy in an appropriately mind-boggling way.

Here's some more information about the exhibition:

Lesser Known Architecture: A Celebration of Underappreciated London Buildings

Lesser Known Architecture is a free exhibition celebrating extraordinary London architecture. Nominated by leading architecture critics, these ten buildings, structures and subways contribute to the mix and diversity of the city but are all too often overlooked and forgotten. Curated by Elias Redstone, Lesser Known Architecture presents an alternative architectural map of the city. Each site has been photographed by Theo Simpson and will be displayed as a series of single colour offset prints in the Design Museum Café and Tank. The installation is designed by Ben Mclaughlin.

The Ten London Buildings Featured and their Nominators:

» Bevin Court nominated by Tom Dyckhoff (BBC Culture Show)
» Brownfield Estate nominated by Owen Hatherley (The Guardian)
» Cabmen’s Shelters nominated by Oliver Wainwright (The Guardian)
» Crystal Palace Subway nominated by Rory Olcayto (The Architects’ Journal)
» London Underground Arcades nominated by Edwin Heathcote (Financial Times)
» Mail Rail nominated by Ellie Stathaki (Wallpaper*)
» Nunhead Cemetery nominated by Hugo MacDonald (Monocle)
» Occidental Oil Refinery Jetty nominated by Owen Hatherley (The Guardian)
» Stockwell Bus Garage nominated by Tom Dyckhoff (BBC Culture Show)
» Welbeck Street Car Park nominated by Sam Jacob (Dezeen / Art Review)

Each nominator has written an overview of their buildings historical and design credentials that will be published in the accompanying journal, Lesser Known Architecture, Vol. 1: London.

The Lesser Known Architecture photographs will also be produced as limited edition prints available to purchase from the Design Museum Shop.
Lesser Known Architecture is part of the London Festival of Architecture 2013.

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News: Mail Online - the world's most popular news website and the winner of a design effectiveness award - has described the gov.uk site that yesterday won the Design Museum's Design of the Year award as "boring" and "basic-looking".

Mail Online journalist Rosie Taylor scoffed at the plain and simple look of the Gov.uk website in an article published after the ceremony in London last night, complaining that "it has only two small pictures" and "features links to pages like ‘Housing and local services’".

"And the award goes to boring.com!" ran the headline on the news site, which earlier this year won the Design Effectiveness Award's Grand Prix for its huge growth in traffic and advertising revenue since its 2008 redesign.

Gov.uk was designed by Government Digital Service, a team within the cabinet office led by designer Ben Terrett, to combine the UK government's thousands of online services in a single website that's meant to be simple and intuitive to use and which uses just one font and dispenses with visual clutter such as images and coloured panels.

The redesign beat over 90 other shortlisted projects and was praised for its elegance and simplicity by Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum that organises the annual awards to recognise "the most innovative and imaginative designs" from the past year.

Watch our movie interview with Ben Terrett filmed in Cape Town as part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour or read more about the Designs of the Year.

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Gov.uk was designed by Government Digital Service, a team within the Cabinet Office led by designer Ben Terrett (see our movie above), to fold the government's thousands of existing websites into just one.

Deyan Sudjic, director of the award-giving Design Museum, said the new website "makes life better for millions of people".

"Gov.uk looks elegant, and subtly British thanks to a revised version of a classic typeface designed by Margaret Calvert back in the 1960s. It is the Paul Smith of websites," said Sudjic.

"The rest of the world is deeply impressed, and because it has rationalised multiple official websites, it saves the taxpayer millions – what's not to like?"

Prime minister David Cameron also said he was "delighted" about the win, adding: "For the first time, people can find out what's happening inside government, all in one place, and in a clear and consistent format."

The core idea behind Gov.uk is to make it as simple and intuitive as possible for the user, Terrett told Dezeen in a movie filmed at Design Indaba in Cape Town as part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour.

"People only go onto government websites once or twice a year to find out a particular thing," he said. "So people shouldn't spend time relearning how to use it. The core of all our work is focusing on user need."

Terrett's team devised 10 principles of good design to guide their work and chose to make them public in the hope they would be useful to other designers, as he explained at the Global Design Forum in London last September. "We believe that if you share work it makes it better," explained Terrett.

The principles are:

1. Start with needs
2. Do less
3. Design with data
4. Do the hard work to make it simple
5. Iterate. Then iterate again
6. Build for inclusion
7. Understand context
8. Build digital services, not websites
9. Be consistent, not uniform
10. Make things open: it makes things better

Terrett also won the graphics category of the 2010 awards with his print-on-demand publishing service Newspaper Club.

The other category winners included the Morph folding wheel in the transport category, the Kit Yamoyo medicine kit in the product category and the brand identity of the Venice Architecture Biennale in the graphics category.

The architecture category was won by a refurbished 1960s tower block in Paris, fashion was won by a film about writer and editor Diana Vreeland and industrial designer Konstantin Grcic won the furniture category for his Medici Chair, after launching a complementary stool and table in Milan last week.

Gov.uk and the other shortlisted designs are on show at the Designs of the Year exhibition at the Design Museum until 7 July.

Last year the award was won by east London designers BarberOsgerby for their London 2012 Olympic Torch – see all news about Designs of the Year.

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News: a folding wheel (above) and the UK Government's redesigned website are among the seven category winners of the Designs of the Year Awards announced today by London's Design Museum.

The seven winners include digital category winner Gov.uk (above), which brings together all the UK Government's webpages into a single site, and the Morph folding wheel, winner of the transport category.

Ben Terrett, head of design at Government Digital Service, explained the design principles behind Gov.uk in an interview with Dezeen filmed at Design Indaba in Cape Town last month.

The architecture category was won by Tour Bois-le-Prêtre (above), a refurbished 1960s tower block in Paris designed by Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal.

The winner in the furniture category is industrial designer Konstantin Grcic for his wooden Medici Chair (above) for Italian brand Mattiazzi, which he complemented this week in Milan with the launch of his Medici Stool and Table.

The Kit Yamoyo medicine container for developing countries (above) by ColaLife and PI Global won the product category, while John Morgan Studio's identity for the Venice Architecture Biennale (below) was named winner of the graphics category.

Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland was chosen in the fashion category for her documentary on influential fashion columnist and editor Diana Vreeland (below).

The overall winner will be announced on 16 April at an awards ceremony in London.

The Designs of the Year Awards are given annually by the Design Museum in London and all the shortlisted designs are on show at the museum until 7 July.

Past winners include the Olympic Torch by BarberOsgerby and the Plumen 001 light bulb by Hulger and Samuel Wilkinson.

Here's the press release from the Design Museum:

The Design Museum announces the seven category winners for the annual Designs of the Year Awards. The awards celebrate the best of international design from the last 12 months. The overall winner for the Design of The Year 2013 will be announced on Wednesday 16 April at an awards evening held at The Angler, South Place Hotel, London.

The seven category winners include GOV.UK, a new British government website which promises to revolutionise governmental online communications, bringing together different government websites into one single site making it a much easier and user friendly service. Other winners include the renovation and reimagining of a faded 1960s tower block in Paris, a landmark documentary an fashion icon Diana Vreeland, a reinvention of the wheel in the form of a unique folding wheel which can be applied to bicycles and wheelchairs and a chair constructed using the latest computer technology.

The Seven Category winners are:

» Architecture: Tour Bois-le-Prêtre, Paris - Designed by Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal

» Digital: GOV.UK website – Designed by Government Digital Service

» Fashion: Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel - Directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland

» Furniture: Medici Chair - Designed by Konstantin Grcic for Mattiazzi

» Graphics: Venice Architecture Biennale identity – Designed by John Morgan Studio

» Products: Kit Yamoyo - Designed by ColaLife and PI Global

» Transport: Morph Folding Wheel - Designed by Vitamins for Maddak Inc.

Pete Collard, Curator of Designs of the Year comments: ‘Designs of the Year is the Design Museum’s authoritative review of the most innovative, forward-thinking and culturally relevant projects from the past twelve months. The work selected demonstrates the many ways in which design can transform our physical and cultural landscape.’

The seven winning designs will now compete for the overall Design of the Year 2013, to be announced on 16 April. The winning entries, along with all the shortlisted designs are on show at the Design Museum until 7 July.

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News: a nominee for the Design Museum's Design of the Year award has caused controversy by presenting 3D-printed copies of two of the other finalists' work.

Antwerp-based designers Unfold presented replicas of projects by fellow nominees Phil Cuttance and PostlerFerguson as part of their Kiosk 2.0 project that went on show at the London museum yesterday.

"Some people have reacted very strongly to it," said Daniel Charny, a curator who nominated Unfold's project for the exhibition. "This is part of what's going to happen with 3D printing. Is it a cheap fake or is it a new piece? When is it okay, when is it not okay?"

Kiosk 2.0 is a mobile 3D printing laboratory modelled on Berlin sausage-vending carts. The replicas were displayed on the cart alongside copies of design classics including Marcel Wanders' Egg Vase, Alvar Aalto's vase and Charles and Ray Eames' wooden blackbird.

Unfold's Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen created versions of Cuttance's Faceture Vase and PostlerFerguson's Papafoxtrot toys by watching online movies about how the products were made and downloading drawings from the internet.

"A lot of the classical stuff like the Eames bird, you can just download," says Verbruggen. "A lot of designers are putting a lot of information about their designs online. A lot of brands, especially in furniture, publish all the digital files because they want architects to use their renderings so they specify their furniture. They don't understand that a lot of that is production data. You can just replicate it."

To generate their version of the Faceture Vase, Unfold watched an online video of Cuttance making the product and then wrote a computer script to achieve the same effect with a digital file.

"We didn't have access to the vases so we couldn't scan them," said Verbruggen. "So we reverse-engineered them. Phil has this really nice movie where he details the whole process, so we started counting how many triangles he uses, how many cuts he makes. We translated that into a computer script and we made a programme that generates them."

Cuttance makes the vases by hand-scoring a sheet of plastic with a triangular pattern, then rolling the sheet into a tube and manipulating it by hand to create a unique shape. This is then used as a mould for a vase, which is cast in resin.

After his initial surprise that his design had been replicated, Cuttance feels that Unfold's project proves how much harder it is to copy craft objects compared to mass-produced items. "In trying to copy my vases they proved what I've been trying to achieve - that a slightly different product comes out each time," he said. "In craft there's an inherent value that is hard to copy."

The process of creating versions of PostlerFergurson's wooden boats was much simpler: Unfold simply downloaded PDF drawings of the products. After that "an intern modelled it in a couple of days," Verbruggen says, adding that PostlerFerguson were "kind of flattered" to see their object replicated at the museum.

"This is a project that's both critical and speculative," said Charny. "It questions intellectual property, the ego of the designer, authorship and authenticity".

Verbruggen said: "The kiosk is a platform for us to learn what are the characteristics of digital design and digital manufacturing and how does it differ from physical design. It's about our role as designers in a post-digital era. We want people to see opportunities, not only threats."

He added: "We want to visualise things that are brewing up on the fringes and put them in a recognisable scenario."

The Designs of the Year exhibition is at the Design Museum in London until 7 July. The winner will be announced on 17 April.

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