Opinion: as Thomas Heatherwick's Provocations exhibition opens in New York, Alexandra Lange questions whether the British designer has done enough yet to prove he can also produce well-built permanent architecture. More about "Can Heatherwick produce architecture that is more than a gimmick or a gadget?"
Opinion: Google's techno-utopian campus design by BIG and Heatherwick is part of a new wave of interest in surprisingly self-centred "hippie architecture", says Mimi Zeiger. More about "The insidious return of hippie architecture"
Opinion: a reactionary government policy from 1899 has turned Washington DC into a city of low buildings, expensive floor space and rampant inequality. A few skyscrapers could change all that, says Matthew Yglesias, executive editor of Vox. More about "Washington DC's aversion to skyscrapers has turned it into an American Versailles"
Opinion: in the noughties, architects OMA worked on a series of optimistic projects for the European Union, including a proposal for a colourful EU Barcode flag and an exhibition suggesting that a united Europe "could be fun". With the EU looking increasingly fragile, OMA partner Reinier de Graaf wonders if they should have bothered. More about "More than just a political system, Europe is a form of modernisation"
Opinion: the farcical in-fighting between architectural education and practitioners – who blame each other for the industry's failures – has to stop, says Robert Mull, dean of the Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design. More about "The much-trumpeted separation between education and practice is a convenient invention"
Opinion: Stalinist Russia turned its military parades into architecture, creating a peculiar form of pomp that still resonates in modern Moscow and emphasises the city's inequalities, finds Owen Hatherley. More about "This spectacle of power was an inversion of the socialist city"
Opinion: the first three Mad Max films established a retro-futuristic aesthetic that has been turned up to 11 in the latest iteration, says Justin McGuirk. But could Fury Road have also stumbled on something a bit more more pertinent? More about "Mad Max cornered the market in a particular vision of the post-apocalyptic future"
Opinion: as super-thin residential towers for the super-rich sprout up across Manhattan, inequality has begun to take architectural form, writes leading US architect Steven Holl. More about "In New York, architecture with a sense of social purpose is becoming increasingly rare"
Opinion: designers have a responsibility to help with the growing refugee crisis in Europe and beyond, says Richard van der Laken, founder of What Design Can Do. More about "Design is more than perfume, aesthetics and trends"
Opinion: Elon Musk is a real-life Tony Stark – a billionaire CEO who wants to change the world. With the launch of his energy-storing batteries for powering our homes, he may actually be developing the technology to do it, says Dan Hill. More about "Elon Musk's Powerwall could change the carbon footprint of entire societies"
Opinion: an exhibition at New York's Museum of Arts and Design about women's role in postwar Modernism highlights the uneasy gender imbalance between craft and industrial design, says Alexandra Lange. More about "Women were unwelcome in architecture, but male architects couldn't live without them"
Opinion: the ideals of Modernism can't survive the pressures of a voracious market that views buildings purely as capital, says Reinier de Graaf. More about "The same architecture that once embodied social mobility now helps to prevent it"
Opinion: the architecture and film industries have quite a few things in common – including expensive projects and the lionising of a certain kind of success. But architects can still learn a lot from the approach of independent film makers, says Mimi Zeiger. More about "Biennials and design fairs function much like film festivals"
Opinion: you don't have to like Thom Mayne's skyscraper for Vals to understand that architecture needs fantastical projects like it, says Owen Hatherley. More about "Modern architecture needs projects like this"
Opinion: the world of kink and fetish is built around ideas of power, control and gender – not that different to our relationships with everyday objects, says Sam Jacob. More about "Kink and fetish has much to teach mainstream design culture"
Opinion: designer Hella Jongerius and theorist Louise Schouwenberg today launch their manifesto, titled Beyond the New: a search for ideals in design. Here we exclusively publish the full text, in which the pair argue that "design has become an impoverished field" and propose a new idealistic agenda for the profession. More about "It's time to rid ourselves of the obsession with the new"
Opinion: more and more design weeks take place around the world each year, but as brands flock in to woo designers, these are in danger of losing sight of their purpose, warns Lucas Verweij. More about "Marketing efforts surrounding design festivals create an oddly temporary gentrification"
Opinion: the elevated highways that cut through major cities around the world were once heralded as harbingers of modernity, but are now seen as pollution-generating, space-guzzling monsters. Will Wiles wonders if they're really all that bad. More about "Who would defend the elevated urban motorway?"
Opinion: hiding in plain sight, the NSA headquarters is the model for all future domestic architecture, argues Jack Self, as he reveals previously unpublished details about the inscrutable building. More about "The authorised information available on this building could be published in a single tweet"
Opinion: despite tweaks and refinements, car design has been restricted by mechanics for over 100 years. Now the development of driverless and electric technologies offers a bewildering array of possibilities, explains branding expert Dylan Stuart. More about "The car industry is on the verge of its biggest design opportunity ever"