The 11th edition of 3daysofdesign favours family businesses over tech startups, with over 400 designers (including a Norwegian postman) exhibiting work

At the Verpan showroom, a space dedicated to the work of Verner Panton , the renowned Danish designer’s daughter Carin Panton von Halem regaled a rapt audience with an anecdote. Apparently when Panton’s cone chair was displayed in a New York shop window in the late 1950s, it had to be removed by the police after drivers distracted by the tomato red seat got into a road accident. She also had stories about how the neighbours of the Pantons’ famous Hornbæk summer house started a petition to get him to change the bright green exterior of the holiday home.

Over at the Hem furniture shop, Finnish designer Yrjö Kukkapuro ’s daughter Isa gave an equally personal speech at the launch of the new edition of Kukkapuro’s experiment chair . She explained how the original launch of the chair coincided with the birth of her daughter Ida. Two wonderful creations.

Politicians and planners are allowing the Thames to become an urban canyon – greed always seems to win out

A Japanese developer has announced it will demolish a new tower of luxury flats in Tokyo it was weeks from completing. The reason? The 10-storey development was blocking beautiful views of Mount Fuji. The idea a developer would reach such a decision in Britain is inconceivable. In London, flats are usually built to make a profit. If they have a beautiful view, good luck to those buying them. To hell with anyone else’s beauty.

One of what we assume was the Sunak government’s last decisions was Michael Gove’s greenlighting of a huge 20-storey concrete slab that is about to rise on the banks of the Thames next to the National Theatre. It is hideous, and will dominate the once-glorious view of St Paul’s cathedral from Waterloo Bridge. Paradoxically, its developer is the Mitsubishi Corporation.

The architecture room of the Royal Academy’s annual event has been turned into a mesmerising ‘museum of making’ by the Turner-prize winners, full of intriguing insights and mind-boggling exhibits

Slimy curtains made of seaweed and hog guts dangle from the ceiling in the central rotunda of the Royal Academy, with the look of slippery skins shed by some reptilian creature. They hang above a busy scene, where workbenches brim with half-finished maquettes and material samples, next to a teetering prototype of a structural stone tower and a plaster mould used to manufacture toilets. A brightly painted model of a Ghanaian coffin, shaped like a phoenix, stands on a plinth made of rubble, while pastel-hued tiles formed from crushed seashells hang on the wall nearby.

This is the architecture room of the RA Summer Exhibition – but not as we know it. The usual selection of little model buildings and impenetrable drawings, often sped through by baffled members of the visiting public, has been transformed this year into a mesmerising museum of making. It is the radical vision of Assemble , the young Turner prize-winning architecture collective, who were ushered into the hallowed ranks of Royal Academicians in 2022, and have breathed fresh life into how their rarefied discipline is shown here.

Eccentric Victorian owner of Waterton Park, near Wakefield, made pioneering decisions to protect wildlife

A Yorkshire parkland regarded as the world’s first nature reserve – which was created by an eccentric pioneering 19th-century environmentalist – has been given a Grade II listing.

Historic England said Waterton Park, near Wakefield , was the earliest known example of a landscape designed specifically to attract and protect native wildlife.