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There is an apocryphal quotation which has been variously attributed to Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello and William S Burroughs: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” At first glance it appears smart, a snide elision of the extremely unlikely. The problem is that dancing about architecture is not really such an odd notion. The two have much in common: dance is about movement in space, buildings are about accommodating movement. 

Yet when Irish architects Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey are chatting about the spaces in their new Sadler’s Wells East building in London, which opens on February 6, they highlight a point of difference. “Dancers do not want anything except a box,” Tuomey says with a smile. “They are so conservative.”

Apparently, dancers need to feel the four corners to be able to situate and orientate their bodies in a space effectively. They are using architecture as a framework against which they perform.

The resulting Sadler’s Wells East complex is, then, not an extravagant blockbuster, but rather a cluster of boxes, a hefty, grounded brick container; urban, almost industrial. And very deliberate. 

It is sited in east London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, a neighbourhood that was once heavily industrialised, a dense brown and grey quilt of factories, tanneries, smokestacks and workshops around rivers, canals and snaking railway lines. That industrial character is clearly referenced in this new building and, though it might be a bit of a cliché in contemporary cultural infrastructure, it works because these kinds of buildings for performance are, in themselves, a form of industrial architecture. There are the truck access roads and loading bays, the pulleys and rigs of the lighting and sound systems, the machinery of the fly towers and the huge doors for stage sets. The backstage area of the dance house is now more industrial than almost any of the other building in surrounding Stratford.

Unlike a factory, though, this cluster of brick volumes has been made welcoming, starting with the massive red “You are Welcome” neon signs over the entrances. The ground floor features a long bar and café area that wraps around the site, enveloping it in social space, with a long concrete bench set into the outside wall. It softens the site well; without it, this might have been a pretty stark building. Its rear wall, for instance, inspired by fragments of the city walls of Rome, is a great cliff of brick, with some enigmatic bulges protruding from its flatness. 

Along with its neighbours, the bleak-looking new BBC Music Studios and another O’Donnell + Tuomey building in the strange squid-shape of the new V&A East, these arts buildings create a kind of cultural wall butting up to Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It is being self-consciously branded as “East Bank”, a new counterpart to London’s South Bank built at a cost of £674.6mn It’s informative to think about the differences. When the South Bank was built in the 1960s and ’70s, it was a bastion against the decaying remains of industry and a pioneering venture into a part of London that would inevitably regenerate. For Stratford, the Olympics played that role and the East Bank looks like a bulwark against the encroachment of generic, globalised investment housing towers.

Sadler’s Wells already has a big dance theatre, a place that grew out of a “Musick House” in a 17th-century pleasure garden between Islington and Clerkenwell. Like the V&A, it has expanded eastward, chasing new audiences, perhaps younger, perhaps more diverse. This new building will allow them to provide a much greater spread of performance as well as providing facilities to visiting dance companies from across the UK.

At its heart is a 550-capacity hall, its seats (a little surprisingly) on retractable but reassuringly solid bleachers. The adaptability of its seating allows for rapid switching of formats (even during an interval), so that an audience may, for instance, find themselves seated for one part and standing in a huge hall for the next. It is a space that will bring London into line with other European cities where dance is better catered for.

This hall occupies about half of the volume of the site, but a complex massing of other spaces wraps tightly around it. Those include six new studios, the largest of which is the same size as the main hall’s stage area. It is in these that the factory-style sawtooth roof profile appears, admitting natural light into the spaces. Most also have access to outside space, to terraces and balconies so that the dancers can grab a little fresh air (the studios are heated to 26C to reduce strains on muscle and potential injury). It might also animate the exterior, giving this hefty chunk of brick and concrete a bit of a buzz.

There are a few curious quirks in the architecture. First, though least visible, is a massive acoustic separation space between the main hall and the smaller one directly above it, to prevent sound from leaking between the two spaces. This helps to pile up the bulk, giving the whole ensemble more presence on the burgeoning skyline. And there is the curious facade to Carpenters Road at the rear, a brick escarpment that betrays the architects’ interest in brutalism and the late modernism of the 1970s. 

The interiors have been done well: from the bars and stairs to the lavatories and the landings, it feels like a generous, modern public space of the kind built in London in the mid 20th century, such as the National Theatre, Festival Hall or Barbican.

This is a building sited amid a weird architectural menagerie, squeezed between the one-time Olympic stadium (now home to West Ham United football club), Zaha Hadid’s fluid and wonderful London Aquatics Centre (surely the grandest municipal pool in the country) and the vast, messy, garish mass of the Westfield shopping centre through which it is approached. It needs to be tough to stand up to this visual cacophony — and it is. This is an architecture that reflects the choreography of London, enabling the city to dance in and around it in ways not yet, perhaps, fully defined.

sadlerswells.com

“Paradise” fans and cheese fries lovers don’t fret. You won’t have to wait too long for another season of the nail biting political thriller.

On Tuesday morning, creator Dan Fogelman responded to a fan on X who raised concerns about the timeline for new episodes of Hulu’s new widely-beloved show.

“Please don’t wait two years to give us season 2 of Paradise @hulu,” the fan wrote.

Fogelman responded, “we start shooting in just a few weeks. It won’t be 2 years I promise! #Paradise.”

The show follows Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) as he tries to hunt down the culprit behind the murder of President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). His death rattles their sunny, picture-perfect community and reveals sinister truths that make Collins realize that everything isn’t as it appears to be.

The finale and the other seven episodes from Season 1 are currently available to watch on Hulu.

‘Paradise’ finale recap: Who killed Cal? What does it mean for Season 2?

‘Paradise’ greenlit for Season 2

Last month, Hulu and Brown announced on social media that “Paradise” had been picked up for a second season. The series received high interest from the start, garnering seven million views for the premiere episode in the first few days on the streaming platform, Variety reported.

“We heard you loud and clear,” Hulu’s caption said. “#ParadiseHulu is renewed for Season 2.”

In light of Tuesday’s finale, Fogelman − also the mastermind behind NBC’s hit show “This Is Us” − shared that that he asked Brown to be a part of the series back in 2022. During a recent appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” Brown said the decision was a no-brainer.

“I’ve read 106 scripts of his, loved every one. This was 107, and I loved that one, too,” the actor said. “He said ‘If you like it, let me know.’ I called him back and I said, ‘I’m in.’”

‘Paradise’ Season 1 episode list

• Episode One: “Wildcat is Down”
• Episode Two: “Sinatra”
• Episode Three: “The Architect of Social Well-Being”
• Episode Four: “Agent Billy Pace”
• Episode Five: “In the Palaces of Crowned Kngs”
• Episode Six: “You Asked for Miracles”
• Episode Seven: “The Day”
• Episode Eight: “The Man Who Kept the Secrets”

‘Paradise’ main cast list

• Sterling K. Brown as Xavier Collins
• James Marsden as Cal Bradford
• Julianne Nicholson as Sinatra
• Julianne Nicholson as Dr. Gabriela Torabi
• Nicole Brydon Bloom as Jane Driscoll
• Jon Beavers as Billy Pace
• Krys Marshall as Robinson

Taylor Ardrey is a news reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her at [email protected].

Built between 1918 and 1921, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House is a madcap, cast-concrete temple of a building. The architect’s first Los Angeles project is often cited as a precursor of Californian Modernism but, with its 3D-design concrete fireplace, it also anticipates the mid-century penchant for bas-relief. Reinvented in Modernist, mostly geometric guise, the ancient art of sculpting a raised-up surface was soon cropping up from Californian fireplaces to the Co-operative Insurance Society building in Manchester, where postwar artist William Mitchell created one of his many striking 1960s and 1970s murals. 

Now the bas-relief is back. Sculptural wall features are being rethought, with a nod to their mid-century forebears. Ceramic tiles are trading flat surfaces for 3D patterns; one-off wall pieces are being sculpted in wood and metal; and eco-friendly materials including compacted cardboard and fabric waste are being pressed into the mould of yesteryear’s concrete. 

At Design Miami in December, the eclectic booth of LA and New York-based gallery The Future Perfect captured the mood. One wall was given over to a sinuous, sculptural wall panel, its interlocking pieces wrought in ivory-coloured clay by French artist Olivia Cognet.

“I’m inspired by that super 1970s moment, how artists were using bas-relief,” says Cognet, a former accessories designer for brands including Lanvin, Isabel Marant and Sonia Rykiel. After learning the skill as a hobby, her first commission was for a Paris home in 2021. Today her pieces can be found in homes across the world, as well as Fendi stores, and while she continues to be inspired by the Californian landscape and its Modernist architecture, she has since moved to the south of France.

I’m inspired by that super 1970s moment, how artists were using bas-relief

Her first studio in Vallauris was once the atelier of ceramicist Roger Capron — a space that “still has some of his work: a bas-relief floor, a table, a barbecue”. “Seventy per cent of our production is bas-relief artworks,” says Cognet, who employs a team of 10 and has moved to a larger, industrial space to keep up with demand. 

LA-based Ben Medansky’s statement textured walls grace the homes of private clients as well as members’ clubs and hotels: a lounge area at boutique New York hotel The Manner, for instance, features two columns clad in organically built-up blue and white panels; at LA’s Proper Hotel, an indoor pool room designed by Kelly Wearstler is lined along one wall with chunky 3D tiles. 

In New York, interior designer Laura Gonzalez opened a new showroom last summer featuring a floor-to-ceiling ceramic fireplace surround by Laurent Dufour, its gently curving cream-coloured panels playfully revealing two dogs’ heads. Artist Peter Lane creates large-scale architectural installations in his vast Brooklyn studio; his work can be found in Tiffany’s New York flagship store, the Four Seasons at Park Lane in London, and the East Hampton home of Robert Downey Jr — a blue-and-gold-glazed fireplace, in neo-Brutalist style. 

All interiors have potential. “At the moment we are working on a large mural for a private swimming pool in London,” says Kris Scheerlinck, one half of London-based design duo Boquita de Cielo. The Belgian architect and his partner in work and life, interior designer Koen Meersman, first began working with ceramics to recreate antique tiles for a renovation project. They trained with a Japanese master and have made their name with bespoke hand-carved clay tiles, finished in their own range of natural ceramic glazes, and installed in homes from Madrid to South Korea. The pair spent 13 years living in Barcelona, where, says Meersman, “there is a strong tradition of having ceramic features in common spaces, inside and outside, of apartment buildings”. 

But ceramic is only a small part of this 3D revival. Cognet has been developing her “shape language in new materials, going from ceramic to leather to stone to wood”, she says of new explorations that were recently shown at The Future Perfect’s LA space. Polish interior design studio Paradowski Studio worked with artist Tomasz Opaliński to create a wooden bas-relief wall in the lounge of Kraków’s Puro hotel, a space inspired by the city’s mid-century architecture. 

More unconventional materials are also at play. At the Mix hotel in Brussels, for instance, designer Lionel Jadot commissioned a cast-concrete relief mural from Belgian-Moroccan artist Omar Griouat to run alongside the pool, but also worked with the collective Papier Boulette to clad a meeting room in a papier-mâché bas-relief, crafted from cardboard salvaged from the hotel’s construction.

In Milan, design duo Studiopepe’s geometric-relief Pleiadi tiles are constructed from cotton linters — a byproduct of fabric production. Used in its natural, undyed state, it is tactile and textural, but also “sustainable and breathable, [with] acoustic-dampening properties”, they say. 

“Designers are always looking for new ways to incorporate texture,” says interior designer Linda Boronkay, crediting Arts & Crafts and Art Deco versions of the trend as inspiration. “In one of our projects in Beirut, we ran with the idea of bas-relief in all sorts of shapes and forms.” A fireplace is wrought in brass and bronze, hammered and punctured to resemble raised-up cigar leaves, while cornices are decorated with papier-mâché and plaster wild flowers. “It’s hyper-textural,” she says. 

But adding 3D elements does not necessitate architectural intervention. Cox London brings a romantic and botanical approach to the 3D wall trend with a trailing and leafy grid of iron and bronze, inspired by Edward James’s Surrealist sculpture garden in the Mexican jungle, Las Pozas. It can be added to a space in the same way as a painting.

Boquita de Cielo also produces ready-to-hang framed panels and, at London design store 8 Holland Street, the current exhibition by Gavin Houghton, titled Such a Relief (until February 22), features clay and plaster reliefs. They may be small compared to some of the bold 3D statements being made today, but they certainly don’t fall flat.

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Artist, artistic director and architect Alexandre de Betak first started travelling to Mallorca in his 20s, irresistibly drawn to the island’s rugged shoreline and remote mountaintop villages. The unhurried existence of the locale provided a counterpoint to the frenetic pace of life as fashion’s consummate showman – which saw de Betak conjure catwalk spectacles, exhibitions and events, and design lighting and furniture for everyone from Raf Simons to John Galliano. Working collaboratively with designers to bring their vision to life on the runway, until recently de Betak would design, creative direct and live-produce fashion shows, choreographing the lights and music. When Simon Porte Jacquemus took over the Palace of Versailles – or a Provençal lavender field – to show his collection, it was de Betak who made it happen.

It was de Betak’s earliest client, the Spanish fashion designer Sybilla, who introduced him to the Balearics, and in 2008 he set about designing and building an otherworldly Flintstones-style property on the north-west coast. “I got hooked,” he says of the experience, which spurred de Betak and his wife, Sofia Sanchez de Betak, to embark on the next chapter of island life. After selling a majority stake in Bureau Betak, the company he founded in Paris in 1990 (to a group where he serves as creative chair), he has stepped back from live production and turned his attention to focus on interior architecture and design. His company, Takbe Studio, which has offices in Paris, draws on his conceptual, and highly creative, approach to spaces. Having produced more than 1,500 shows, it is something of a seismic shift in pace for de Betak; although if things started low-key, the company is growing. “I decided to quite drastically change from one life to another,” he says of his career pivot, which is driven, to some degree, by a desire to create something more permanent and environmentally aware, as well as a more harmonious life balance. “I’m very happy to be working on things that last longer than the few minutes of a fashion show.” Not your average interior designer, he says: “I love doing houses. But I work for others as though it’s for myself, I don’t compromise.” Not that it’s deterred the handful of high-end (anonymous) clients who have already hired him. 

Each of de Betak’s interiors projects – whether a 17th-century hôtel particulier in Paris or a stripped-back SoHo loft – has been radically different. His latest, a light-touch renovation of a four-bedroom mid-18th-century finca in the foothills of the Tramuntana mountains, where he occasionally spends time together with Sofia and their six-year-old daughter, Sakura, is no exception. (De Betak also has two sons, Amaël and Aidyn.) Though secluded – there is little around but ancient olive groves and grazing sheep – it’s accessible; Palma is 30km to the south. “We’d been looking for a project that’s something different for a while,” says the peripatetic designer. “I’m always dreaming of untouched places, but it’s so hard to find somewhere authentic.” Although Mallorca is brimming with old farmhouses, most have been unsympathetically modernised and overly polished, or are simply not for sale.

After a long search, Sofia spotted this rare gem – raw and unrefined with a timeworn limestone façade – while out driving. Once they had met the owner, an elderly woman whose father had spent time restoring the place during the 1930s and who had no family to pass it on to, it was theirs. Typical of these rural dwellings, it was originally built as much for animals and agriculture as for people, with the entire ground and top floors given over to grain storage. It had precisely the crumbling, uninhabited patina de Betak is drawn to. The walls were cracked, the plumbing and electricity minimal (water still comes from the well) but, he says, “we loved it as it was”.

De Betak’s goal, partly to circumnavigate the lengthy process of permissions, was to design a temporary fix for the interior to make it more workable. As he is a self-confessed “light freak”, sorting the electrics to better illuminate the interior was of primary concern. Rather than working in stages, he tends to picture a finished space almost instantaneously and in totality, from the furnishings he will source, pulled from his vast archive, to the design and build, right down to the curtains and the cutlery. His vision for the finca was enacted to the extreme: to dress almost the entire interior – walls, ceilings, windows, upholstery and detailing – in pure white antique “marriage” linen from the 19th and 20th century. “These old fincas are beautiful but I wanted to warm it up,” says de Betak, who collected hundreds of sheets (half from the local market, half from Marché Vernaison in Saint-Ouen), then worked on the elevations, carefully measuring the space before commissioning a local seamstress to stitch each sheet together piece by piece, like an enormous textile puzzle. 

Guided both by necessity and playful aesthetics, the result is a series of rooms that are conceptual yet womb-like, calming and comfortable. “It’s like camping but not camping,” he says of the transitory, yet transportive, atmosphere. The linen skin that dresses the interior is hung in a makeshift manner, using dog clips and hooks. Its fabric drapes cleverly conceal a multitude of sins – and enabled de Betak to swiftly rework the plumbing and electrics without ever touching the surface of the walls. 

Surprisingly chic, the textile treatment has been applied to all the bedrooms (Sakura’s room is cherry-blossom pink) as well as the sitting room. Here, the painted floors are layered with unusual milky-white Turkish carpets sourced from Istanbul. At the far end of the room is a row of Sarfatti chairs by Marcello Piacentini, each loaded with books on everyone from James Turrell to Madeleine Castaing and bound in white. Even the once black bungee cords on the René Herbst tubular metal Sandows dining chairs from 1928 have been customised with white elastic cords. “I design in a childlike way,” says de Betak. “I like places to be alive and fun and relaxed.” Buried beneath the linen are LED lights that softly illuminate the space by night, and along the entire length of the wall is a broad, pillowy, modular daybed that he custom-created. “It’s not just about preservation,” he says. “I like things to evolve.” 

The entire living space is an idiosyncratic assortment of objects and furnishings; a turn-of-the-century Fortuny lamp, a brutalist glass table, a Frank West 1990s light, retro-futuristic Elipson speakers and the snaking form of a 1970s Boalum light from Artemide. Suspended above the dining room table is a pair of large, bell-shaped light shades, each covered in delicate dried leaves, sourced from the Paul Bert Serpette flea market in Paris. “It’s a weird mix,” says de Betak, who is less preoccupied by objects’ provenance than with creating the right balance. Similar to a fashion show, making memorable spaces is for him all about evoking a feeling. Here, the intention was to summon a pared-back style that’s visually inspiring but also restful. The overriding emotion is one of wonder. “It shows you can have this very lovely historic house but inhabit it in a very natural way,” he says. 

The atrium, however, is another story. A shiny lacquered black box, the floor is daubed with the high-gloss resin yacht paint. Only the original mustard-yellow frames around the doors, and the 1980s disco lights stacked on the stairs (a throwback to his teen days of arranging lights and music at “boum” parties) punctuate the alien atmosphere.

If there is a synchronicity between the experience of creating a catwalk show (although short-lived) and creating homes for clients, it’s that de Betak is a master of the atmospheric environment. “There was never time to change things,” he says of the intense tempo of the showspace renovation, which he is now, very deliberately, dialling down. “I don’t want to call it temporary,” he says, pondering where the space sits on the scale between ephemerality and permanence. “It’s a real sanctuary.” 

For de Betak, this more fluid way of designing interiors offers him freedom – one that reaches its apex in the attic: a den-like hideaway. Looking out towards the shaded canopy of a pine tree that’s perfect for picnics, its exposed wooden beam-and-bamboo ceiling and chalky floors are part-desert encampment, part-celestial cave. But it is within the stripped-back interior that de Betak from time to time engages in his own form of creative thinking. The space is a blank page. 

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The writer is the FT’s architecture and design critic

For a few months after the fire in 2017 that killed 72 of its residents, Grenfell Tower loomed like a charred skeleton over London. It cast a shadow over the city’s inequities in housing, a reminder of lax building regulations and the fire brigade’s tragic response, advising people to stay in their homes and wait for help that never came.

First as a blackened frame and then as a white-tarp-clad slab bearing a giant green heart, the tower has stood as a ghostly tombstone haunting every journey west out of central London, by road, rail or Tube. Its presence condemns the inadequacies of British construction and our seeming inability to accelerate the building of social — or any — housing at scale.  

Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, said last week, after what now looks like rather cursory consultation with survivors and families, that the remains of the burnt-out tower would be dismantled. It was followed by an inevitable clamour about lack of consultation and disrespect. But the structure is deteriorating.

When the 24 storeys of the tower were completed in 1974, it joined a smattering of other high-rises on the west London skyline. The nearby Trellick Tower, once the city’s tallest residential building, was designed by Ernő Goldfinger and completed two years earlier. At the time, each tower contained only council housing. They came towards the end of a massive spurt of construction by local authorities — in part to replace second world war damaged or decrepit stock.

That era now looks almost impossibly distant. The fire (which followed a shoddy refurbishment in 2015-16) led to a public inquiry laying bare the shocking state of the UK’s construction industry and its wholly inadequate regulation. The Building Research Establishment, which should have been responsible for ensuring the safety of materials, had been privatised in 1997 and was now in effect dependent on the manufacturers for business. Contractors and suppliers took full, cynical advantage. Architects were lazy and compliant. The local authority, Kensington and Chelsea, was criticised for cosmetic changes undertaken in part to make the concrete tower look more acceptable to increasingly wealthy neighbours. And somewhere at the bottom of the priorities were the residents who might, before the tragedy, have been seen as a lucky few, having secured subsidised housing in a mixed and lively central London neighbourhood.

A block in which dozens have died is a sensitive thing. Alongside whatever physical proposal is mooted for the site — which must surely include public housing — perhaps a green space might be nurtured, an echo of that green heart on the tarpaulin. Late modernist high-rise council housing suffered from a notorious neglect of the public space around it; parking, bin storage and indeterminate zones that belonged to no one. The value of land is clearer today than it was in a city still perforated with bomb-sites. We should reflect on the real value of public space: a playground, a park, a pond, a piazza, each a sign of life to counter the memories of death.

At present, Grenfell Tower stands like a marker of a particularly British inability to rebuild. Of course it will be painful for survivors and neighbours, but it is also toxic for a city to constantly contemplate its own tragic failures — while neglecting the dearth of decent housing. Cities change and evolve but their streets and spaces do not have to forget: names, places, walls and memorials can be inscribed to prevent that.

The real memorial to those who died would be a complete rewriting of the building regulations, which remain open to abuse, and a kick-start to social housebuilding. If the headstone is to go, something needs to replace it. But this might be more widespread, more able to facilitate good, thoughtful architecture and construction and far more effective in ensuring it can never happen again.

Letter in response to this comment:
Grenfell Tower fire tragedy has broader lesson about regulation / From Michael Romberg, London W1, UK

When we think of refugee camps we probably imagine rows of tents, rapidly erected responses to crises. We might envision those seemingly ubiquitous UN tarpaulins in blue and white. But the problem with emergency temporary shelter is that it usually stays around.

These rapidly-built settlements may endure for generations, becoming townships, developing their own urbanity, their architectural infrastructures of education, community and healthcare. The informal becomes institutionalised, the ad hoc concretised.

The problem, of course, is precarity. These camps are intended to be temporary, the residents often dependent on aid and the hospitality of their hosts, stripped of much of their agency. Often located where the local population faces extreme hardship, the issues around these camps can be exacerbated by resentment of the aid received by refugees.

Yet somehow camps are built and people manage to maintain and build lives in them — Cooper’s Camp in Nadia, West Bengal, a temporary refugee camp established after the Partition of India in 1947, is still home to thousands. There are vast camps such as those around Dadaab in eastern Kenya, housing more than 300,000 refugees in minimal conditions of basic shelter. At the other end of the scale is Kilis in southern Turkey, where there are sophisticated new shelters. Syrian refugees have repopulated a city centre that had been almost abandoned by local residents who had moved to more modern accommodation outside the historic core. 

Refugee settlements are a necessity in response to crises, which are increasingly climate as well as conflict driven, but can they evolve and be made better? And what is their future? 

“Many refugee camps were established in the 20th century without much planning,” says Nerea Amorós Elorduy, an architect, researcher and founder of Creative Assemblages (a “think-and-do tank”). “Those older parts were more organic and people tend to prefer that. The default plan, though, is the grid. It’s odd because in urban studies we learn how cities develop organically, how they respond to topography, about the nuances and the routes, and then, when we plan for refugee settlements, we make them like military camps.

“Things like walkable cities . . . or how we should make a city good for children to live in [so it becomes] better for everyone — we forget this when we plan for refugees,” she adds. “It would be great if we started with more exchange between urban studies and humanitarian urbanism.” 

The UNHCR is advocating alternatives to camps. We hope they should be a last resort

There have been repeated attempts to create more hospitable, liveable and communal places but they often fail. One frequent proposal has been the communal kitchen, an attempt to foster community, share resources and labour and encourage interaction, particularly among women. “I have worked in 11 countries . . . and I have never seen one that worked,” says Roupen Alexandrian, an operations director at UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. “When people are in crisis, they don’t associate with communal spaces and [consequently] don’t take care of them. People make kitchens in their shelters, their homes. That is their refuge.”

Rama Nimri, an architect who is a settlement planning officer at UNHCR, says approaches are shifting. “The UNHCR is advocating alternatives to camps,” she says. “We hope they should be a last resort. It is true they provide safety but they also isolate refugees and foster dependency on aid, and they can create friction with local communities. Instead we hope for . . . a ‘settlement approach’, where refugees can live alongside local residents.”

This depends on the policies and approaches of host nations but it has significant advantages, she says. Both Nimri and Elorduy point to Brazil and Colombia, where millions of refugees, most notably from Venezuela, have been absorbed into communities with remarkably little hostility, and often positive economic outcomes for host communities.

“When refugees are allowed the freedom to work, it creates development,” says Nimri, pointing to Kenya’s attempts to foster a settlement approach at Kalobeyei, just outside the huge Kakuma refugee camp. In part, this is an understandable effort by a host country to capture some of the investment made by the UN and other non-governmental organisations in building “temporary” camps. If some of that investment can be used to create hospitals, schools and other civic infrastructure that can also benefit local residents, everybody wins.

In Kilis in Turkey, the 120,000 Syrian refugees who arrived during the civil war exceeded local residents — though some of the former have since dispersed. The two communities, initially wary, have begun to adapt to each other’s traditions, even down to the colours used to paint their shelters and modest civic buildings. The influx has transformed the once downtrodden town into an active, busy metropolis, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016.

Big name architects have been keen to be involved, including Norman Foster, Shigeru Ban and Zaha Hadid Architects. While there is some scepticism about starry interventions, the architects Yasmeen Lari and Marina Tabassum have attracted widespread attention.

Lari has worked with refugees from Pakistan’s catastrophic floods to create resilient and beautiful structures using local materials, both domestic and civic (she calls it “barefoot social architecture”). Some of the refugees, particularly women, have learnt to make the materials and structures, providing a living for the future.

Tabassum, meanwhile, has been involved in the creation of small “Khudi Bari” houses for the Ganges flood plain in Bangladesh — resilient housing adapted to climate change. She has also worked in Cox’s Bazar in south-eastern Bangladesh, the world’s biggest settlement, housing nearly 1mn Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar. The buildings of local materials and modest means could not be further from the ubiquitous UN tents.

The “paradox of permanent temporariness” is hauntingly captured in a provocative work by architects DAAR, Andy Hilal and Alessandro Petti. “Concrete Tent” is an installation, originally built in 2015 in the Dheisheh refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem, which has since become a roving artwork.

Described as a “space for collective mourning and solidarity with Palestine”, the tent-shaped structure, reimagined in a more permanent form, embodies the gap between the tent and the monument, the ephemeral and the eternal. That almost 2mn people were recently displaced by war in Gaza reminds us that the work’s subject remains painfully urgent.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic