How did UK activists outfox 700 police? Why was Hong Kong traffic stopped by ‘mini Stonehenges’? And could an octagonal treehouse and a crow’s nest really have saved a German forest? Our writer enjoys a 200-year history of resistance architecture

In his 1868 street-fighting manual, Instructions for an Armed Uprising , the French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui sets out meticulous instructions for how to build a good barricade. Such defences, he wrote, must no longer be thrown together in “a confused and disorderly fashion”, but should be robustly composed of two sturdy rampart walls made of paving stones and plaster. All the aspiring revolutionary needed was a good supply of cobblestones and “a cart filled with sacks of plaster, plus wheelbarrows, handcarts, levers, picks, shovels, mattocks, hammers, cold chisels, trowels, buckets and troughs”. Blanqui advised that all of these things could be “requisitioned from the respective merchants”, whose addresses were handily listed in an accompanying directory.

The students at UCLA, who were peacefully occupying their campus in protest against Israel’s war on Gaza, might have wished for such supplies when they were attacked by a violent mob of vigilantes last week. Terrifying footage showed masked thugs beating their makeshift encampment with sticks and metal poles, dragging away steel fencing and plywood panels, and tearing apart their tents and gazebos, amid fireworks and clouds of bear spray. The hastily assembled camp stood no chance against the brute force of an organised gang intent on inflicting violence, terror and destruction.

They were seen as heroes and martyrs who defied the Nazis. But a new show in Weimar reveals horrifying details about some Bauhauslers, one of whom designed the crematoriums at Auschwitz

If the day of Otti Berger’s death is not known, its place and cause are. In April 1944, Berger – part deaf, Jewish, a communist – was arrested in her home town of Zmajevac, in German-occupied Yugoslavia. On 29 May, she was put on a transport to Auschwitz. After that, nothing.

Of the eight Bauhaus students to die at Auschwitz – half the number murdered in other camps and ghettoes – Berger was the best known. With Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, she had revolutionised weaving, turning it from a craft into an art. She had come to Dessau – the iteration of the school most of us think of as the Bauhaus – in 1927, when she was 28. That same year, belatedly, the school had opened a department of architecture. A few months later, a young Austrian called Fritz Ertl signed up to study at it.

Tony Cragg’s cosmic forms grace a Yorkshire manor, while the Lion of the Punjab roars back to life – all in your weekly dispatch

Tony Cragg
Wobbly cosmic abstract forms materialise around one of Britain’s most spectacular stately homes.
• Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, until 22 September

The British brand has entered the booming market in luxury “car-chitecture”, opening a themed tower in Miami boasting ballroom, helipad and infinity pool – all offering millionaires a perfect view of our choking, collapsing world

Move over, James Bond – a new Aston Martin has rolled into town, brimming with more flashy features than Q could ever dream of. Parked ostentatiously on the Miami waterfront, overlooking a private marina brimming with superyachts, its streamlined flanks glisten in the Florida sunshine, housing an interior trimmed with the finest leathers and exotic wood veneers. There’s no ejector seat or rocket-launcher, but it is the biggest Aston Martin ever made – housing Jacuzzi, bar, cinema, golf simulator, art gallery, ballroom and infinity pool, all crowned with a 66th-storey helipad.

Unveiled in the week of the Miami Grand Prix, the latest exclusive model from the timeless British automotive brand is not a high-performance sports car, but an ultra-luxury apartment building – the tallest residential tower in the US, south of New York. After Aston Martin’s years of financial woes , following a disastrous stock market performance since the company’s 2018 listing, it seems that the boutique car-
maker is seeking salvation in property development.

A ‘non-hierarchical’ university space that can be continually altered or even moved has won the EU’s biennial prize for contemporary architecture

A lightweight university study centre designed to be easily disassembled has won the prize for the best building in Europe. Longevity, permanence and a sense of immutability might be the ambition of most architects, but Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke would be delighted to see their building adapted and reconfigured, or ultimately dismantled and moved somewhere else altogether.

“We imagined the project as a changeable system,” says Düsing, co-designer of the new study pavilion for the Technical University of Braunschweig , Germany, which has been named this year’s winner of the EU Mies award (formerly the Mies van der Rohe award), the biennial European Union prize for contemporary architecture. “We wanted it to be a counter model to the university’s high-rise building and its conventional one-sided lecture halls. It’s more like an extension of the landscape that can be forever modified, a non-hierarchical space that the students can make their own.”

A new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society looks back on years of radical change in the city for better and worse

In recent decades New York City has changed dramatically, transforming from the lows of the crime and drug epidemics that ravaged the city in the 1970s and 80s to the resurgence and optimism that typified the 90s and the surge in gentrification that has been a source of debate more recently. Amid all of this transformation, one might make the assumption that these are new forces that New Yorkers are being forced to grapple with – not necessarily so.

In fact, one of the points of the New-York Historical Society’s fascinating new exhibit, Lost New York, is that these forces have been transforming the city for a much longer time. The exhibit brings to light layers of history that have generally been forgotten, showing how landmarks, practices and communities have been integral to the city’s formation, even though they may not be remembered.

Prospect Cottage on the beach at Dungeness, Kent was a home and sanctuary for the artist and film-maker Derek Jarman. The gardens are world famous, but the interior, shielded from public view by net curtains hung by his partner, Keith Collins, after his death, has been largely unseen. This haven has been photographed by Gilbert McCarragher, and Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman’s House is published by Thames & Hudson

The austerity-hit council's decision to stop funding the arts is a calamity for a city whose rich contribution to the UK – from the Rep, the Royal Ballet and Tolkien to heavy metal and the Streets – is such a vital source of civic pride

The Birmingham Rep altered the course of Britain’s cultural history. Opened in 1913 by the dramatist Billie Lester, the company’s ambition to champion formally innovative work and new writing attracted the likes of Laurence Olivier, who joined in 1926. The Rep hosted British premieres of works by Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. The current theatre building is one of Birmingham’s finest examples of mid-century architecture – designed and built in 1971 by Graham Winteringham, its glossy, futuristic front conceals an interior that still carries the excitement of an airport departure lounge in the early days of flight. But today, the fate of the building and its activity hangs in the balance. Closure is possible, with funding from local government to be withdrawn completely by 2025. The theatre’s artistic director, Rachael Thomas, tells me that the situation is dire, “a microcosm for the hollowing out of civic life that is taking place across the city”.

Birmingham city council declared itself in effect bankrupt in 2023. Austerity measures imposed by the Conservative government had finally created an intolerable climate for one of the largest local authorities in Europe. Due to an enormous funding deficit, cuts of £300m are planned to take place over the next two years, including reduced waste collections and dimmed street lighting. All funding to local arts organisations, including the Rep, Ikon Gallery and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, will be scrapped by 2025, with a 50% reduction already imposed this year. The decision has been condemned by figures such as Birmingham Royal Ballet’s director, Carlos Acosta, the musician Actress, members of Duran Duran and Napalm Death, and Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, among many others.

Crown prince’s pet project was sold as a 105-mile-long city of the future, but finances may have led to a rethink

It was billed as a glass-walled city of the future, an ambitious centrepiece of the economic plan backed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to transition Saudi Arabia away from oil dependency.

Now, however, plans for the mirror-clad desert metropolis called the Line have been scaled down and the project, which was envisaged to stretch 105 miles (170km) is now expected to reach just a mile and a half by 2030.