“Oh yeah, I know it mate. You can’t miss it, it’s flippin’ massive!” onoffice is in Manchester to see the Co-operative Group’s glittering new headquarters, and our request to the taxi driver for 1 Angel Square was initially met with a blank look. Though the building’s amorphous form has penetrated the city’s consciousness, its address apparently hasn’t. In banking hierarchy, the Co-operative has always been more Captain Mainwaring than Gordon Gekko. When the air was…

Jefferson Hack, co-founder of Dazed magazine group, has a new venture. MAD London is a boutique creative agency specialising in advertising campaigns for clients such as Tod’s, Chanel and Diesel. The eight-strong team has set up shop on the third floor of a buff-coloured brick building on Golden Lane, off London’s Old Street. Built in 1850 to house a clock-maker and a button manufacturer, the building is a neat microcosm of Clerkenwell’s working history, from…

Our view of disability has changed immeasurably over the centuries. In medieval times, it was regarded as divine retribution for some heinous transgression. Later, the Victorians deemed the afflicted dangerous, the safest course of action being to lock people in asylums. (There were a few enlightened exceptions – at the Normansfield Hospital, Victorian founder Dr John Langdon proposed education and activity as treatment rather than restraint and castigation, even building a theatre for his patients.)…

The ultra-minimalist new office of Junta de Castilla y León – the advisory board of Castile and León, an autonomous region in northwestern Spain – appears to differentiate itself defiantly from the traditional architecture around it. One of its starkly monolithic perimeter walls stands right opposite a 12th-century Romanesque cathedral with ornate domes. These butter-smooth walls zigzag wildly at jagged angles, seemingly unsympathetic to the neighbouring buildings’ crumbly aesthetic. Contemporary architecture rarely gets a look-in…