Building Sights

Janet Abrams reflects on the Arab Institute on Paris's Left Bank (architect Jean Nouvel , 1988), one of President Mitterand's portfolio of buildings designed to change the profile of Paris.

Architect Nigel Coates delights in Chelsea Football Stadium's East Stand (Darbourne and Darke, 1972). 'Most people couldn't think of this as architecture,' says Coates, 'let alone architecture worth celebrating. More than ever before, architecture should be allowed to have a real personality to release a sort of energy, and I think this is a pretty good example.'

Television executive and ex-architecture student Janet Street-Porter asked architect Piers Gough to design a house for her in London's Smithfield. For the first time on television, she shows the result.

Peter Palumbo , chairman of the Arts Council, praises Holland House, an office block built in the City of London by the Dutch architect Berlage. 'This beautiful and obscure building,' says Palumbo, 'is the most important piece of early 20th-century architecture that our capital possesses.'

Writer Gillian Darley examines the new award-winning David Mellor Cutlery Factory in the Peak District of Derbyshire. Designed by architect Michael Hopkins and opened this year, it is extraordinary because it is round.

Artist and photographer Jenny Okun visits the Blackburn House in London's Hampstead, by architects Peter Wilson and Chassay Wright (1989). She argues that the Blackburn House - part office, part gallery, part flat - is important because really adventurous domestic architecture is such a rarity.

The Boots factory is a vast glass palace built by Owen Williams in 1932. Iwona Blazwick from London's ICA tours the factory which is acknowledged as a masterpiece of early British modernism. It is, she says, 'a sort of chemical cathedral for cold creams and toothpastes'.

Architect Edward Cullinan thinks the best post-war building in London is the Royal College of Physicians in Regent's Park. Designed by Sir Denys Lasdun in 1960 it is, he says, 'a very, very good building from a much-derided period'.

Internationally renowned architect James Stirling examines the Katharine Stephen Room - rare books library of Newnham College, Cambridge (1988 Birkin Haward/Joanna Van Heyningen). 'I like the building because it's small and monumental,' he says. 'It has achieved an incredible presence which to me is the definition of monumental.'