Amanda Levete was eager to draw visitors to the hub of this year's festival, the Victoria and Albert museum.

The award-winning British architect, a rare woman in a male-dominated world, set up her practice AL_A in 2009 and has quickly become one of the world's most watched names. In 2000, Future Systems, the firm Levete previously headed, won the RIBA Stirling Prize for their futuristic Lord's Media Centre - an all-aluminium building that sits above the famous cricket ground. On a smaller scale, she has also delved into product design with works like her marine-mammal shaped champagne bucket for the Le Caprice restaurant and the 'Drift' bench for UK-based furniture firm Established & Sons.

For the V&A installation, Levete created Tidal Wave. Made in collaboration with engineering firm Arup, it's a self-supporting, 12-metre wide, three-storey high structure predominantly constructed using American red oak.

Responding to the museum's Renaissance-style facade, Levete came up with a spiralling latticework wave which curled asymmetrically over the entrance steps. The technical ingenuity came from the undulating laminated chords of the structure, which were assembled by British firm Cowley Timberworks using techniques normally found in furniture-making.

The effect was both powerful and graceful. It's a clear testament to Levete and her practice, which led to their assignment to design the museum's new ?5 million extension, set to open in 2016. Levete's use of oak for her LDF installation hints that she may once again use the material for a large descending staircase leading into the extension's subterranean hall.

Levete is also ratcheting up the commissions: there are outstanding European projects underway in Lisbon and Naples (the latter in collaboration with sculptor Anish Kapoor), as well as a luxury shopping mall and hotel in Bangkok that will open in 2013.

John Pawson - Perspectives

The father of modern minimalism, architect John Pawson's contribution to the LDF puts his pure aesthetic to clever use: located in the southwest tower of Sir Christopher Wren's St Paul's Cathedral, Pawson's installation is a geometric staircase entitled Perspectives, marking the 300th anniversary of the church's completion.

The self-supporting stairwell offers quite literally an insight into the edifice constructed after the Great Fire of London. Pawson said he wanted to offer a new perspective into a 'less familiar' part of the building, as opposed to the more touristy areas of the church.

He mounted a concave crystal meniscus on a mirrored-top hemisphere at the base of the staircase - a part of the building which was 'a detail, but also a complete architectural moment in its own right,' he says. It allows observers to take in a view of the staircase spiralling upwards.

At the top of the tower, 23 metres up near its cupola, a two-metre mirror has been suspended to offer ground-level visitors an aerial view of the staircase. Both allow you to get two views at the same time from one single point. It's an immersive glimpse of how a spiral coils in and out - your eye drawn to gliding line, undersides and footsteps of the going up and down, and ultimately a pane to light and proportion. Such an aesthetic has led to growing anticipation of Pawson's next project: in October, the architect put forward a plan to transform the interiors of the Grade II-listed Commonwealth Institute into the new home of London's Design Museum, which is set to open in 2014.

David Chipperfield - Two Lines

A standalone structure on the bank of the River Thames didn't perhaps have the same physical or meditative impact as Levete's wave and Pawson's optical device, but modernist architect David Chipperfield, who set up his eponymous practice in 1984, has championed a sensitive sort of austerity where architecture is concerned.

His project for the London Design Festival, a pavilion made out 28 glass panels incorporating a reflective mesh called Sefar, wasn't so much architecture or design but a way of observing. Throughout the day, viewers of the structure were able to observe the eerie changes between opacity and translucence in the structure during various times of the day according to the nuances of light.

But sensitivity shouldn't be confused with bland sensibility. Yes, his buildings aren't instantly memorable, but quite literally, it's what's on the inside that counts. Ironically, it's his galleries that have brought him the most praise. Take the Folkwang Museum in Essen and the award-winning Neues Museum in Berlin, both German galleries that reflect Chipperfield's masterly quality in achieving a sort of grand temple-like silence, light carefully siphoned into the spaces to help the visitor appreciate the art.

Chipperfield's having a moment in the world of architecture: he recently won the architecture prize at this year's British Design Awards for his bastide-like Hepworth Wakefield gallery in Yorkshire county, which some locals have reportedly likened to a 'concrete-bunker'. Still, you can't please everyone.