ANNEXE

Amphibious assault

Protection of Europe's largest colony of rare great crested newts is holding up development of a new £500m satellite "town" planned for a derelict brickworks site near Peterborough.

Although the developer, Peterborough Southern Township, has offered to create a £15m reserve for the 30,000 or so endangered amphibians, the World Wide Fund For Nature has threatened to bring a case to the European Court unless the area is declared a Special Area of Conservation.

Concrete jumble

The fate of the Royal National Theatre now rests with the Environment Secretary, John Gummer, who has issued an Article 14 notice enabling him to call a public inquiry into plans by the NT to remove the building's lower terrace - an "act of mutilation", according to Sir Denys Lasdun, who designed the powerful concrete building.

Mr Gummer's action comes after Lambeth Council's decision earlier this month to allow the removal of the terrace on the grounds that this would "unmask the architectural integrity of this important building". Confused? John Gummer must be too.

Rebel honoured

Tadao Ando, Japan's most admired architect abroad, has won this year's £60,000 Pritzker Prize, an American award established in 1979. Ando's reputation was made by his refreshing use of unadorned concrete.

The least conformist of Japanese architects, his work attracts much negative criticism in his home country. He was, however, chosen to design the Japanese Pavilion at the Seville Expo, which he realised entirely in wood. The prize will be presented next month in Paris.

Risky heritage

Caxton Hall, the one-time celebrity register office in Westminster, central London, Friern Barnet Hospital in north London, Holborn Town Hall in Camden, north London, and all the former railway buildings on the King's Cross railway lands, also in Camden, are "at risk", according to a report published by English Heritage today. In the Public Interest is published in addition to EH's annual "At Risk" register, which identifies 900 of London's historic buildings as being in a state of neglect.

Around 65 per cent of the entries are residential buildings, mainly Georgian and early Victorian. For the first time, the register lists historic cemeteries and churchyards at risk, including the Grade II-listed Highgate cemetery in north London.

`In the Public Interest' is available from English Heritage Postal Sales, price £6.50. Tel: 01604 781451.

Complex cosmos

Charles Jencks, the writer and critic who defined the Post-Modern condition in architecture in the Seventies, is hoping to do the same for Chaos Theory in the Nineties.

His latest book, The Architecture of the Jumping Universe, attempts to explain why so much of today's cutting-edge architecture springs from ideas both ancient and modern about the cosmos. An associated exhibition of cosmic sculptures by Jencks opened at the Redfern Gallery, Cork Street, London this week. Jencks will lecture on his latest ideas at the ICA on 4 May as part of its "Spaced Out" season.

Money for fun

The Commonwealth Institute, the swooping Sixties building hiding behind a row of flagpoles in Kensington High Street, London, is the subject of a £7.5m application for Millennium Commission funding. But fans of the copper-roofed Grade II-listed building, may be alarmed to learn that the money is not intended for repairs, but for three "visitor experiences". The institute says it must attract paying visitors because Foreign Office funding will end by 1999.