"Beijing will permit public protests inside three designated city parks during next month's Olympic Games, but demonstrators must first obtain permits from the local police and also abide by Chinese laws that usually make it nearly impossible to legally picket over politically charged issues.

The arrangement announced Wednesday marks a break from normal practice in China's authoritarian political system and seems loosely modeled after protest zones created at previous Games and at many recent international political gatherings that have attracted large numbers of protesters.

Liu Shaowu, director of security for Beijing's Olympics organizing committee, said Ritan Park, Beijing World Park and Purple Bamboo Park would be designated for protesters during the Games and that the approval process would be regulated by Beijing's public security bureau."

It's not the control of public protest that is strange here, but one of the designated sites. The World Park is a model village which features 106 of the most famous landmarks from 14 countries and regions around the world.

On one hand, this might seem a bizarre means of both trivialising and poilicing public protest by placing it in a what is essentially a global theme park. But perhaps there is something more to the idea of protest in a model village.

After all, in places which like to think of themselves as 'free' the very same issue of control of public gathering is wrapped up the guise of security concerns. For UK readers, you might not be able to protest outside Downing Street, or in Parliament Square, but imagine a scenario where you could find yourself protesting outside a miniature simulation of these places. Perhaps, a media park delivering perfectly posed imagery for the nightly news - a protestors equivalent of Capricorn 1 - in which the moon landing is faked in an earth bound studio.

Thus protestors in the World Park might embark on a range of varied protests: against whaling outside the Katzura Imperial Villa, or against the invasion of Iraq outside the White House - allowing the global stage of the Olympics to be used to address a whole range of global issues. Single-issue politics has never been so convenient!

In the same spirit of simulated environments for protest, somebody missed a trick this year by failing to organise a May '68 convention at Paris, Las Vegas.

Perhaps the operators of the World Park might like to invest in these figures from German model railway supply company, Preiser.

That the World Park has already embedded alternative narratives is something explored in Zhang Ke Jias 2004 film 'The World' which, according to IMDb is "An exploration on the impact of urbanization and globalization on a traditional culture".

The synopsis:

"The World" is a theme park on the outskirts of Beijing, sixteen kilometers from the Chinese capital, designed around scaled representations of the world's famous landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The site is seen here not from the visitors' point of view but through the eyes of a few of its staff, lonely people, communicating poorly, a bit disillusioned with life, glittering for the tourists but dull and restricted as far as they are concerned. We meet, among others, pretty young dancer Tao and Taisheng, a security guard who is fond of her but not of personal commitment..."

The Fountainhead is the best Hollywood movie about architecture, but that's not saying much. Unlike lawyers and doctors, architects don't get much screen time. And if they do, it's just an incidental element to the plot or a quirk of characterisation rather than the narrative engine of the movie. There's the dad out of the Brady Bunch, Woody Harrelson in Indecent Proposal, the guy in Spike Lees She's Gotta Have It. We've never had an architectural version of Dr Kildare, Columbo, or a Quincy RIBA. Architecture and architects seem to be almost invisible in movieland. The Fountainhead shows that its not because architecture is inherently un-fictionalisable and that it can be used to dramatise universal human concerns.

It's very much of its time - 1940s America, where idealistic pre-war European Modernism (concerned with making the world a better place) intersected with corporate, business-minded American modernism. It's a dramatic moment where Modernism became denuded of its radial politics. Though 'radicalness' is part of the Fountainheads plot mechanism, it's a commodified form of radical-ness concerned with aesthetics and personal expression rather than utopian politics.

The movie is populated by a series of characters which - while extreme - seem as though they could be with us today. Sixty odd years later we still see the same characters - the vacuously successful, the wild idealist, the washed up hero of a previous generation, the scheming power crazed journalist, the client whose got a few ideas about how to improve the design. The main protagonists are variously described as: 'the man who couldn't be, and doesn't know it'; 'the man who couldn't be, and knows it'; 'the man who could have been,' and 'man as man should be' - It's like a cross section of any London Festival of Architecture event.

The dramas between these personalities are played out at the hubristic scale of architecture. The Fountainhead uses architecture to discuss ideas of integrity, beauty, love, and truth. It's a Hollywood spin on Modernisms morality, where the qualities of honesty to materials are replayed as romantic assets, construction sites become landscapes where individual integrity is played out.

The film is full of brilliant quotes that resonate with any architect and superb situations that seem like they happen daily - certainly in our office - only not quite as sharply styled. You'll hear the same polarized arguments replayed in the architectural and popular press about contemporary architecture: "A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!" Or "You can't hope to survive unless you learn how to compromise. Now, watch me! In just a few short years I'll shoot to the top of the architectural profession because I'm going to give the public what it wants."

And, some superb career advice too: That telling your clients they are wrong is the best way to get ahead. That blowing up your projects that have gone wrong is the best thing to do. But perhaps, most of all, that all architecture is tragedy.

The heart of the narratives conflict is the conflict between heroic singular genius and collective taste. And strangely, though the movie offers these as opposing polarities, it is this territory that was explored by the next generation of American architects and urbanists: from Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown to Peter Eisenmann. These are architects which deal with an idea of doubt, who struggle against both the heroic modern position the commercial. And finding in compromise - or at least the space in-between certainties - between ideas, between selling out, between building and disgust, between morality and money a new ground for making architecture. One might speculate that the Fountainhead was responsible for crystallising the drama of modernism and market led architecture and laid the ground for American avant guard responses.

The last ten years have seen an unprecedented global building boom and we really need a Fountainhead sequel to dramatise 21st century positions. Perhaps we could transpose contemporary architectural characters into the film as you watch it. Or imagine the Fountainhead franchise played out over the cities from zero on the Gulf Coast with Anthony Hopkins playing Richard Rodgers, or Danny Devito as Danny Libeskind , Angelina Jolie as Zaha, or even budding architect Brad Pitt as himself.

It's their wrongness that makes them so fascinating. They are mutations of architectural fundamentals - ropey foundations, weird windows, strangely placed doors, freakish stairs, Gordian Knots of plumbing, building gone badly wrong. They begin to suggest a whole language of congenital architectural defects: blind windows, amputated staircases, atheromatic corridors, conjoined structures - deformities and perversions of the normal architectural body.

Construction itself - the way you put stuff together, the layers of cladding, insulation, membranes, structure etc - are not simply convenient, practical and inevitable means of making a building, they are expressions of deep seated cultural beliefs. Organisation of structure, drainage, ventilation and so on are more than simply arrangements of components, they encode a belief system into the fabric of architecture.

'God is in the detail' actually means something more like 'morality is in the detail'. The detail determines the specifics of how and where the enclosure and function of architecture is articulated and formed - and it expresses morality by defining socially acceptable standards of building. The detail brings decorum and articulates the interface between inside (the realm of civilised culture) and outside (the realm of wild, unsocialised nature).

We see, for example, a soil pipe running through the middle of a room, articulated as though it were a significant architectural moment. And in a sense the pipe that's used to exit sewage from buildings is super significant and as worthy of celebration as the means by which the building deals with gravity.

In another case, a balcony on a new apartment block appears without any means of access, attached to a blank wall - like false eyelashes attached to a blind window. In another, an old building seems propped up on some old oil drums - inducing a sense of panic at its seemingly imminent collapse - articulating the latent disaster that lurks within every building.

Bad construction challenges - albeit unconsciously - the civilising power of architecture. It's disgusting and fascinating - a monstrous version of architecture: freakish, disfigured and wired up wrong like a patched together zombie and un-naturally animated. Such extreme badness surprisingly reveals how architecture manifests morality. Through its most outlandish errors, it suggests that there might be other ways of organising construction - and that might mean architecture which enables explorations of alternative cultural ideas through the nuts and bolts of putting a building together.