But if ever, one day, a new Lodge arises we can be sure it will be a wondrous architectural creation posed at a desirable spot beside or above the Lake.

The "Lodge On The Lake" is imagined by m3architecture. And, because this particular design for a Lodge will never be built (for it was not a winner in a competition for Lodge designs) it qualifies for the Australian Institute of Architects Augmented Australia 1914-2014 exhibition and project. Luminously described in Friday's column (with a haunting picture of a Capitol building the Griffins imagined for Canberra but that never got built) Augmented Australia presents super animations and 3D images of 22 architectural projects imagined for Australia but for all sorts of reasons never built. This Lodge On The Lake is one of the 22. Via the dashing online version of The Canberra Times you can take a tour of of this Lodge and its surrounds. Look for the magical moment when the reflection of a rainbow-coloured hot air balloon passing near the mansion is caught in the "mirror" of the Lodge's glassy walls.

Of their conception the architects warble that "the 'Lodge on the Lake' is a city within a city, enriching Lake Burley Griffin’s environment through the moderating form of a glasshouse. This is a place for landscape and inhabitation, but to the external gaze there is a sense of the fragile illusory city, an idealised place mysteriously present. Mirroring and miniaturising [Walter Burley] Griffin and [Marion] Mahony’s notions of the ideal city, the Lodge moves beyond previous forms.

"As planners, Griffin and Mahony manipulated landscape at the geological scale. At the scale of the house their built work nestles within the landscape. The Lodge responds in kind. The city/glasshouse acknowledges broad axis, frames views and extends lake, sky and bushland. At the smaller scale, within the walled city, an intimate natural environment is allowed to flourish where buildings act as support structures to the landscape."

Yes, it would be a fine thing for an Australian prime minister to live somewhere so idyllic and to be able to go down to the lake, to talk to his or her intellectual equals, the swans; to skim stones across the lake's mirror-like waters (not that all prime ministers will have the intellectual and physical co-ordination that skimming requires) while wrestling with issues of great social and political import.

Meanwhile another of the never-realised 22 (as reported, animations and pictures of them were created to be part of the Australian display at the current la Biennale di Venezia) is a smart and elegant "Tower skin". The brainwave behind this creation by LAVA architects is that very ugly brutalist buildings (LAVA's example was the UTS Tower in Sydney) might give "[ugly] buildings across the globe a ‘second life’, avoiding the costs of demolishing and rebuilding ... the simple, cost effective, easily constructed skin transforms the modernist icon into a stunning, sustainable, site-specific structure. A lightweight structure based on surface tension allows a high tech membrane to freely stretch around the tower."

Yes, with its new "skin" the UTS Tower is beautified and given some of the mystique that veiled things always have. Its applications in Canberra, a city dotted with fugly buildings, are exciting in the extreme. There will be no need after all to demolish the brutalist High Court of Australia and ANU School of Music (or to require nouveau riche owners of the most grotesque mansions in places like O'Malley to hide their manors behind trees). Let us instead give them a becoming, beautifying "skin".

We think M16 Artspace is turning Japanese, we think it's turning Japanese, we really think so (an esoteric reference there to the famous and catchy 1980s hit song by The Vapors).

M16 Artspace advises that it's hosting Japanese Encounter which embraces a big contemporary touring exhibition, brought to Canberra from Japan by the Japan Foundation and the Embassy of Japan. It's all "an exploration of the Micropop Imagination in contemporary Japanese art".

Among the attractions there are this weekend some screenings of Japanese animated fantasy Anime films ("perfect for school holidays" M16 enthuses). One of the films is Spirited Away (2001), winner of more awards than most of us have had hot dinners and the most successful film in Japanese history.

It tells the highly plausible story of Hiiragi, a 10-year old girl, who strays into a spirit world, in which among other adventures her parents are turned into pigs by Yubaba the witch. Can Hiiragi and her porcine parents escape from this hell and get back to the normalcy of suburbia?

Hiiragi finds a comrade in the form of a mysterious boy, Haku, who is sometimes an urchin but sometimes (as in our picture of Haku with Hiiragi) a fabulous dragon. An important part in what unfolds is played by a magic emetic dumpling. There is a lot of supernatural vomiting.

Spirited Away is shown at 12.30 on Sunday July 20 and everything about Japanese Encounter, its attractions, events and schedules, is at M16's website m16artspace.com.au