Opinion: Walter Segal's self-build houses in south London and Assemble's Turner Award-winning Granby Four Streets project in Liverpool are rightly celebrated, but they're not the answer to the housing crisis, says Owen Hatherley. More about "The cult of self-build and do-it-yourself won't solve the housing crisis"
Opinion: toy makers have designed a disturbingly codified world for children that says more about adult self-loathing than how kids really want to play, says Sam Jacob. More about "Toys have become small plastic tablets of moral code that we hand down to the next generation"
Opinion: the TED and Pecha Kucha presentation formats have passed their best-before dates, says Lucas Verweij, who thinks it's time for a more honest approach to sharing design industry stories. More about "We're fed up with being fed unrealistic stories of overnight success in design"
Opinion: "intellectual vapidity and weasel-minded corporate ambition" are sucking the life out of architectural criticism. But there is still hope, says Catherine Slessor. More about "Cerebral, self-absorbed, tepid, dull and decorous"
Opinion: as 2015 draws to a close, Will Wiles offers five New Year's resolutions for architecture and design, ranging from less Zaha-bashing to abandoning the idea of favela chic. More about "New Year's resolutions for architecture and design in 2016"
Opinion: municipal architects helped create some of 20th-century Europe's best cityscapes and buildings, says Owen Hatherley. It's time for them to return. More about "Wouldn't buildings be better designed by people who lived in the city where they practiced?"
Opinion: there are concrete tactics that architecture can use to make people feel mentally and socially safe, says Aaron Betsky, but the real question is how we apply them to public buildings and spaces. More about "We face calls for safe houses, safe communities and safe spaces"
Opinion: London auction house Christie's is auctioning off trinkets and clothing from the estate of Margaret Thatcher, one of the UK's most controversial prime ministers. Sam Jacob takes a closer look at some of the items on offer. More about "What would you do with a piece of Thatcher memorabilia?"
Opinion: from drones to driverless buses, robots are seen as a replacement for workers who do society's "dirty, dangerous and dull" jobs. But robotic infrastructure has much wider implications for how our cities work, says Dan Hill. More about "Robots may force us to confront how we treat the people that currently make our cities tick"
Opinion: KPF's attempt to recreate the allure of a red Porsche on the facade of Los Angeles automotive museum has left us with an eyesore, says Mimi Zeiger. But can it teach us anything about our architectural now? More about "The Petersen isn't a good building, it's a western-town front posing as architecture"
Opinion: the Volkswagen emissions scandal has exposed how the car industry's obsession with data is preventing it from designing for real people, says Luis Cilimingras of design consultancy IDEO. More about "This noxious story highlights the car industry's obsession with technology instead of humans"
Opinion: is the idea of the smart city really just another way for big businesses to make even more money, asks Reinier de Graaf, who revisits the subject against his own better judgement. More about "The smart city is the ultimate free-for-all"
Opinion: in the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict, the most mundane forms of architecture have become political and ideological battlegrounds, says Eleanor Jolliffe. More about "The political influence of the family home should not be underestimated in Israel/Palestine"
Opinion: the Chicago Architecture Biennial stands out from an avalanche of pointless events by doing things its own way, says Sam Jacob. But can it be sustained? More about "Chicago boldly imagines its own definition of what a biennial might be"
Opinion: while many architects are designing slippery "architexture", Norman Foster and Alejandro Aravena are unlikely allies in the pursuit of real architecture, says Will Wiles. More about "Foster and Aravena are moving architecture out of the shallows and into deeper water"
Opinion: former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili may be wanted on multiple criminal charges in his home country, but his architectural legacy has helped him win political favour in Ukraine, says Owen Hatherley. More about "Saakashvili didn't need interesting architects to design the New Georgia"
Opinion: Manhattan's rash of skinny towers for the super rich is helping turn New York into an extreme work of art. It's a Capitalist Jerusalem made real, says Aaron Betsky. More about "Manhattan is theirs, we just get to admire it"
Opinion: controversial computer game Prison Architect offers a grim lesson for real-world architects, whose good intentions often count for nothing, says Will Wiles. More about "Prison Architect is a graveyard for the utopian spirit where noble ambitions go to die"
Opinion: dominated by old boys who think their view is the only one that matters, architecture academia in the US has become insular and out of touch, says Reinier de Graaf, who finds a perfect illustration in a recent debate at the Chicago Architecture Biennial. More about "Academics need to break out of their loop and get back into the real world"
Opinion: sci-fi films, comic books and wild hypothetical ideas by architectural theorists like Archigram and Cedric Price have helped shape the world we live in today. Darran Anderson identifies the next wave of unwitting futurists who could change the way architecture functions. More about "Architecture's eccentrics and outsiders can be retrospectively recast as prophets"