HOWZAT

For once we have a great home-grown talent to celebrate. Expect Baconmania to take hold and rampage in his old Soho stomping grounds as, to herald his forthcoming centenary, Tate Britain stages a spectacular retrospective show.

Art market

Speculators will certainly be looking about warily this year. Last autumn the market had a light brush with breakdown when a much-touted sale of Impressionist paintings flopped. It turned out to be a classic case of overreaction to economic wobbles. Before the art sales were over, the boom was most definitely back.

But how long can it last? Can it survive a credit crisis? A reverse in trends has been predicted for quite a long while now. Many think this readjustment is long overdue. But it could prove a rough ride. People at the salerooms could be hanging on to their seats.

ARCHITECTURE Tom Dyckhoff

Beijing

We’re not supposed to like icon projects any more: too glitzy, too, well, Dubai. Oh, but we do, we do, we do! And there’s nothing like that glorious combination of a command economy, a newly wakening super-power eager to blow raspberries at the US and the television sets of the entire world being focused on it for creating them.

Herzog & de Meuron’s “bird’s nest” stadium, Norman Foster’s humungous airport, Rem Koolhaas’s state TV megalith, a watersports venue made from giant bubbles . . . rest assured, there’ll be plenty to gawp at on telly next summer between the 100m dash and the synchronised swimming. Watch it and weep, Baron Coe.

Colchester, Leicester, John Lewis: the year of unlikely design champions

In snoozesome old Blighty these days you have to sniff out glam contemporary architecture in unlikely spots. Rafael Viñoly may well be building his “walkie-talkie” skyscraper in London, but it’s in Colchester that he will make his UK debut in the new year with the Firstsite art gallery, shaped like a giant banana.

Second bite of the Uraguayan-American superstarchitect goes to Leicester, where Viñoly’s Performing Arts Centre opens in the spring. Just around the corner, Foreign Office Architects open a crystalline glass department store for that tireless defender of the avant garde, John Lewis. Next you’ll be telling me that Zaha’s rebranding Clinton Cards. She is? (Only kidding.)

The parasols of Seville

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