Marble dust crunches underfoot, frost is forming on your eyelashes and you can’t feel your thumbs. Ahead a structure looms like the wreck of an ice-breaker – magnificent and useless. But not abandoned. A crowd is circling and there are even people clambering up the sides. After all, this is not sculpture, this is architecture. This is Zaha Hadid’s latest… thing.

Suddenly America is building some of the world’s most exciting architecture. So what’s happening in the land of the mall?

"Would you like tea or coffee?" "Sparkling water," answers Tadao Ando through a translator.