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Deserving tributes have been paid to writer Ray Bradbury, who died this week. Much has been written about the way his fiction expanded our imaginative worlds, to alien planets and future realms. Less remarked on were Bradbury's contributions to the real world – and specifically, to the field of architecture.

Beyond his daily fiction-writing regimen – his movies, plays, TV shows and so on – Bradbury found the time to not only weigh in on architectural matters but also take an active role in them. For better or worse, he was a key influence in two major urban trends of the past few decades: theme parks and shopping malls. The former came about through his friendship with Walt Disney. According to Bradbury, they simply bumped into each other on the street in Beverly Hills one day. With their shared interests in childhood nostalgia and futuristic utopianism, Bradbury and Disney made a natural connection, it seems. And, having been animated by a visit to the 1933 Chicago World's Fair as a 12-year-old, Bradbury leapt at Disney's invitation to consult on the 1964 World's Fair in New York. Ray scripted the US Pavilion's potted history of America movie, while Walt had a hand in several exhibits, including the first of his It's A Small World animatronic rides for the Pepsi Pavilion.

In fact, Bradbury could be thought of as an honorary "imagineer", who helped blend fantasy and entertainment into the design mix. He later consulted on Disney's grandiose Epcot vision, originally planned as a model city for 20,000 residents in Florida, and the two of them enthusiastically planned monorails for Los Angeles. After Disney's death in 1966, Bradbury still worked with the company. Epcot became more of a World's Fair-type exhibit, centred on the Buckminster Fuller-inspired Spaceship Earth dome, which Bradbury helped design and script.

From Disney imagineering to postmodern California shopping malls seems like a natural progression, but apparently it didn't happen that way. Rather, it happened via Bradbury's writings on urban design. Bradbury bemoaned the decline of American city centres in the 1970s, and the people who were letting it happen. Even in the 1950s, his fiction was dystopian; he envisaged future cities that became deserted after business hours, while everyone stayed indoors and watched TV. These were the same trends the New Urbanist movement was picking up on, though Bradbury's solution was rather different. In his 1991 book Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures, he outlined the concept of a "people machine" – a sort of enhanced shopping mall to revitalise the dying city centres.

"Malls are substitute cities," he said at the time, "substitutes for the possible imagination of mayors, city councilmen and other people who don't know what a city is while living right in the centre of one. So it is up to corporations, creative corporations, to recreate the city."

Bradbury's analyses of urban conditions tended towards the simplistic, it has to be said. The corporatisation of the public realm cannot be considered a unanimously good thing and, ironically, his favourite cityscape was the Latin quarter in Paris. He also complained that the profusion of homeless people was a result of insufficient medication. But, as with his fiction, his predictions proved accurate. Bradbury prophesied, for example, that LA's Century City mall would fail because it didn't have enough restaurants. And it did – until they added some restaurants.

Bradbury's prescription of giant malls as the cure to American urban decay was also broadly borne out. He was recruited as a consultant by architect Jon Jerde – now one of the world's leading mall designers – on some of his early projects, including the Glendale Galleria, the Westside Pavilion, and San Diego's outrageous Horton Plaza – a mall so exuberantly postmodern it makes your eyes hurt. It's imagineering in action. Not that they would have given Bradbury much succour. For him, the US dropped the technological baton decades ago, when they gave up the space race. The only architecture that would really have satisfied him, one suspects, is a permanent moon base, from which to launch manned expeditions to Mars. Perhaps that'll come true as well, but unfortunately Bradbury won't be around to see it.

Big blueprint … Renzo Piano's Landmark Tower in the Yongsan district of Seoul will be the world's second tallest building. Photograph: Renzo Piano Building Workshop

On to the rest of the week's developments, and while Renzo Piano's Shard has been getting all the attention in the UK (look out for a Piano interview here next week), the Italian architect has another skyscraper in the works – and it's twice the height. This is the Landmark Tower, in the Yongsan district of Seoul, South Korea. Like the Shard, it's a slender, tapering, glass structure, though it's more curvaceous, and will mainly be office space inside, with a podium conference centre and an underground shopping complex. It also claims to feature a "light scoop" that transfers sunlight from the upper storeys down to lower levels. When completed, it will be the second tallest building in the world: 620 metres high, 111 storeys. It's even shardier than the Shard.

The Yongsan international business district is set to be something of a haven for well-known architects with big plans – or perhaps a playground. It's Seoul's equivalent of London's Docklands (except bigger). The former military base will soon be a forest of tall buildings, under a plan by Daniel Libeskind, and it looks like their designers are stumbling over themselves trying to outdo each other.

Piano's tower is the calm centrepiece, but other architects frantically at work there include Bjarke Ingels Group (whose interlocked twin towers look like a giant "#" – though "the Hashtag" is hardly the most poetic name for a skyscraper), MVRDV (whose similar scheme of linked twin towers, called The Cloud, was read by some as a crass parody of the World Trade Centre mid-explosion on 9/11), Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill (who brought you the Burj Khalifa – they call their two-tower scheme the Dancing Dragons), Murphy/Jahn, Coop Himmelblau, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Dominique Perrault and many others. And possibly trumping them all for pseudish descriptors, Libeskind himself, whose offering is a trio of Dancing Towers "inspired by the traditional Korean Buddhist dance known as Seung-Moo". It puts London's gripes into perspective, doesn't it?

Down to humbler concerns and another, very different haven for big name architects added a few more this week: Maggie's Centres. The pioneering cancer care charity has already enlisted the likes of Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Richard Rogers to design its domestically scaled centres in hospital grounds. This week it announced two more. Norman Foster is to design a Maggie's Centre at the Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester, and leading US architect Steven Holl is designing one for Barts hospital in London. This could be Holl's first completed project in the UK, unless he finishes his Glasgow School of Art extension first. Holl is also giving the Royal Academy's annual architecture lecture on 25 June.

Behind the Curtain … an artist's impression of how the site of the newly-discovered Curtain theatre in Shoreditch, east London, might eventually look. Photograph: PA

And finally, right down to earth, and under it, where this week the remains of Shakespeare's long-lost Curtain theatre were found. The fact that it was just off east London's Curtain Road, a stone's throw from the blue plaque declaring it to be around there, suggests it shouldn't have been too difficult to find. But this is still a landmark discovery for English literature – a third Shakespearean structure to add to the tourist map, alongside south London's Globe and Stratford. Remains of the Curtain's floor – paved with sheep's knuckle bones, a commendably sustainable and organic construction material – were discovered beneath a courtyard during construction in Shoreditch. The site could now be redesigned to incorporate the discovery.

A 0.6% increase in wholesale inventories lifted the markets higher during the midday with the Dow rising 24 points to 12,485. Nasdaq gained 11 points to 2842.

On the upside

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn acquired additional shares of Navistar International (NYSE: NAV) to increase his stake to 11.87%.

Cantor Fitzgerald initiated coverage of Neonode (Nasdaq: NEON) with a Buy rating.

Shares of Zalicus (Nasdaq: ZLCS) continued climbing after a Seeking Alpha contributor wrote yesterday that the company was one of five biotechnology stocks poised for growth.

On the downside

TheStreet Ratings affirmed its Hold rating on US Steel (NYSE: X).

TheStreet Ratings reiterated its Hold with a ratings score of C on Exelon (NYSE: EXC).

Shares of Quicksilver Resources (NYSE: KWK) continued falling after TheStreet Ratings downgraded the company to a Sell rating yesterday.

In the broad market, advancing issues outpaced decliners by a margin of nearly 5 to 4 on the NYSE and by nearly 7 to 5 on Nasdaq. The Russell 2000 which tracks small cap stocks rose 3 points to 763.