Wonders & blunders

My wonders are the Antoni Gaudí buildings in Barcelona, such as the Sagrada Familia cathedral, and the two houses on Passeig de Gràcia, Casa Batlló and Casa Mila – the latter of which has lots of lovely blue twisty turret things on the roof. I love all the Arabic touches and the mosaics.

Gaudí's buildings have a slightly surreal element; they're almost like sculptures, and the idea that you can walk along the road and look at a sculpture every day, and that it's functional as well, is rather uplifting for the soul. I spent four days wandering around Barcelona spellbound.

My blunder is, bizarrely, the building containing the Design Council in Bow Street, London, opposite Covent Garden's Royal Opera House. It used to be a telephone exchange, and some of it may still be. It's a horrible 1960s concrete eyesore. You have everyone drinking in the Floral Hall looking out at it and they've obviously thought "we can't have that", so they've come up with this ploy of putting mesh on the outside to hide it, which kind of almost works. It seems rather ironic that the Design Council should be in a building that people have tried to cover up. That's what I think they've done, anyway.