"Cookie-cutter houses" the result of poor planning, Stirling Prize is clueless on what British architecture should be and Boris Johnson's plans likened to Saddam Hussein.
"If you want to find out what is happening in Australia's cities today, don't go to the well-doctored planning glossies. You would be much better advised to attend a major railway station at peak hour, sit in a freeway traffic jam thirty kilometres out of town, bid at a house auction or inspect the abandoned excavation for a failed inner-city office block or apartment tower."
Inside
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"This is not merely an issue of taste. So many of the cookie-cutter houses that constitute the kicked-over garbage can of suburban sprawl come from unconsidered house plans."
Boston.com
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"But for others, last Saturday marked a low point for the prize, which has lost any sense of what British architecture should be and has become about rewarding clients with deep pockets and cocking a snook at those who make do on considerably less."
BD Online
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"That situation exposed the lack of sophistication of the debate in this country. It was shocking that it couldn't be discussed in a more adult way. It shows that nothing has really got any better [since the 1980s, when Prince Charles launched his last big broadside at architecture]."
Financial Times
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"You need to pinch and punch yourself to be sure this isn't 1 April. News that Boris Johnson is planning to build a £15m monument, in what appears to be his own honour - it couldn't be London's - in the grounds of the 2012 Austerity Olympics in Stratford, must surely be a joke. This is the kind of thing you'd expect from a Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il or, of course Shelley's "Ozymandias" (Ramesses the Great), but not an elected mayor of London in the second decade of the 21st century."
Guardian
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