For the seventh consecutive year, Curbed’s own Alexandra Lange and the critic Mark Lamster of the Dallas Morning News cover the ups and downs, triumphs, and tragedies of the year in design.

The Jackie Treehorn Connoisseurship Award: LACMA, for acquiring John Lautner’s Sheats-Goldstein Residence. We raise a White Russian in salute.

Jacques Cousteau Award for Civic Design: Miami, soon to be America’s first casualty of sea-level rise.

Worst Use of $4 Billion in Public Money: Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus is a very pretty, very expensive shopping mall for well-heeled tourists.

Shut Our Mouths Award: Los Angeles, for opening the Expo line and voting in a tax increase toward further transit expansion. We’ll never make traffic jokes again.

Moerenuma Park, from above.

The bus stops in a parking lot next to a trailer, in an industrial area north of Sapporo, one of the snowiest metropolises in the world, capital of Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido. Everyone gets off, including the bus driver. Standing on the asphalt outside the door he looks at me and says, “35.” That’s what he had said to me at the bus station when I queried him with the one word, “Moerenuma?”

Moerenuma Koen is Isamu Noguchi’s last work, a 400-acre public park, completed in 2005, that includes mountains, rivers, beaches, and forests of play equipment. It combines Noguchi’s greatest ambition, in terms of scale, with his smallest, in terms of audience. In any chapter on the artist and designer’s desire to shape space, Moerenuma is the endpoint. And yet, even among modernist friends and Noguchi fans, I couldn’t find anyone I knew who had been there.

Travel stories about the Hokkaido region focus on skiing and real mountains, not tetrahedrons. Design-inclined tourists head south to the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, in Takamatsu, which looks lovely and rural. I, however, was looking for the ultimate Noguchi experience.

Kodomo Yume Park, Kawasaki City, October 2016.

“Play freely at your own risk,” a well-known sign at Tokyo’s oldest adventure playground, Hanegi Playpark, reads. All three elements—play, freedom, risk—are in ample evidence at Kodomo Yume Park, a newer addition to the city’s play infrastructure. There’s an open space where young kids are building a village with their own hands, and a mesa of dirt, donated by a construction company, that has been riddled with canyons and holes. I was in Japan to visit adventure playgrounds for book research, and at every playground, at some point, a child poured a bucket of water down a trench, just to see where it would flow. News articles about adventure playgrounds tend to focus on the hammers and the saws, but for many urban children simply mucking about can be a pleasurable way of spending an afternoon. I was reminded of my own younger brother, who never found a stream or puddle too small to fall into. If Hanegi Park had been down the street, he would always have known where to go looking for mud.

My trip coincided with the publication of “The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play!” in the Times Magazine, a masterful bit of parental trolling whose comment section reached a symbolic two thousand and sixteen entries before it was closed. The dozens of adventure playgrounds in Tokyo offer, as a public amenity, what Mike Lanza (the “anti-helicopter parent” in question) says he created in his private Menlo Park, California, back yard: a challenging and unscheduled place for physical play that is largely free of parental supervision. Lanza is far from alone in believing that American children have a play problem. Take a look at Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids blog, which is peppered with reports of cops and child-protective services being called when parents leave their kids to play unsupervised. Lanza’s own book, “Playborhood,” describes the kids-can’t-play problem as both a social one and a spatial one. Without broader community support, such back-yard attempts at free play like his are doomed to become exercises in vanity. Look at them on the roof! My kids are more resilient than yours!

Vanna Venturi, at her house. Courtesy VSBA.

On Thursday, November 10, the Vanna Venturi House in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, was added to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, providing the 54-year-old house—which has been called “The First Postmodern Anything”—with its first preservation protection. The historical commission will now have to be consulted about any changes to the house’s exterior.

In a perfect world, the interior would be covered too, as the so-called Mother’s House without its angular stair or slot-like widow’s walk would just be a flat symbol— the kind of superficial interpretation of postmodernism Venturi and partner Denise Scott Brown have always fought against.

By coincidence, I had my first opportunity to visit the Mother’s House two days later, as part of a symposium organized by the Museum of Modern Art on Venturi’s concurrent project, the book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which just turned 50. Along with two busloads of architects, I descended upon Chestnut Hill to shift positions within and share in the strange beauty of the small, low-ceilinged rooms of this building, iconic because it was designed to be so, but unmonumental IRL.

The Maison de Verre, in Paris. Courtesy The Jewish Museum.

There was a time when I wrote about many apartments. Apartments with rubber floors. Apartments with transparent bathtubs. Apartments with flip-up facades. Toward the end of interviewing their architects I would ask, almost as a throwaway, “is there a house that inspires you?” Nearly everyone answered, “the Maison de Verre.”

Maison de Verre—designed by architects Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet in Paris in 1932—is, as its name suggests, a glass house designed to solve a set of strangely familiar urban problems: a historic hôtel particulier; a tenant who won’t move out; a doctor who wants to work from home.

The result is a poetic machine, a two-story building set in a courtyard between two existing party walls, that creates a specific atmosphere out of its compromises through the deployment of translucent, textured curtain walls and movable parts—louvered windows, retractable stairs, pivoting screens. It makes those other glass houses, which only have to keep out the rain, look a little bit lazy.

Apparently, you have to see it to believe it, which makes the idea of a retrospective on Chareau (1883-1950) that’s not in Paris, home of his only remaining work of architecture, seem perverse at best.

Edward Larrabee Barnes’s New York Botanical Garden, 1974. Courtesy Metropolis Books.

If there is a plaque commemorating the location of the entrance to Alfred Ely Beach’s pneumatic railway, built in secret below 265 Broadway, in lower Manhattan, the writer Sam Lubell and I did not find it on a ninety-degree day in August. Once upon a time, the basement of this building across from New York’s City Hall was frescoed and furnished with a piano, a plashing fountain, and goldfish tanks. Admission to the subway, which ran along a two-hundred-and-ninety-four-foot tunnel for three years, from 1870 to 1873, was twenty-five cents. Today, there is only an emptied-out bank branch, its basement piled with garbage and large rat traps. Such is the afterlife of transportation dreams, this one squelched by Tammany Hall’s support for the rival Central Underground Railway’s Broadway line, or perhaps the opposition of merchants who didn’t want the street in front of their shops torn up for a decade.

I met Lubell in lower Manhattan because the area proved to be central to his research. He and his co-author, Greg Goldin, have completed “Never Built New York,” a lushly illustrated compendium of almost two hundred utopian, dystopian, gargantuan, high-flying, and low-lying plans that never made it. As in their previous collaboration, “Never Built Los Angeles,” the authors have pulled images from scores of archives, adding concise histories of each project. The design of the book highlights the stories that boosters use to sell such schemes, with magazine-style pull quotes demonstrating how superlatives have always been part of the architecture game. “Casual, inspired living, minus the usual big-city clamor,” Frank Lloyd Wright said, of his “last dream” to turn Ellis Island into an experimental, self-contained city with glass domes holding theatres, hospitals, churches, schools, a sports arena, and a library. If anything, and for once, Wright was too modest in describing his ambitions.

In third grade, a tall, curious girl named Jane Butzner was expelled from school. A dentist had come to the school, George Washington in Dunmore, Penn., to talk to students about oral hygiene, and, at the end of his speech, he asked them to promise to brush their teeth, morning and night. Jane’s father, a doctor, had told her that a promise was a serious matter, not to be made lightly. So how could she and her classmates promise to brush their teeth twice a day for the rest of their lives?

The request put Jane in moral jeopardy. She would not raise her hand, and she made sure that the other students did not follow blindly. “Don’t do it,” she whispered. “Don’t do it.” Some of the children who had raised their hands put them down, sowing confusion. When Jane’s teacher found out what she had done, they argued, and Jane refused to back down. She knew she was right. “At her wits’ end, she expelled me,” Jane told an interviewer in 1992. “It came to me good and strong and fast that I was an outlaw.”

National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photo by André Chung.

You don’t even need to go inside the new National Museum of African American History and Culture to get the point. Imagine the alphabet soup of agencies that govern the National Mall gave you a site, just to the right of the Washington Monument. When you came to them with your first idea, they cut it down. Too tall. So you draw a box next to the monument, a dotted square against the green lawn and the blue sky. Into that square you could fit a concrete donut like SOM’s Hirshhorn Museum, or a stone prism like I.M. Pei’s East Wing, or another box with columns like most of the other museums.

But you decide you didn’t have to fill that square or make a solid. Instead, you’ll make a gem. Your museum will be smaller, lacier, more mutable. Gold in the morning and glowing at night. The NMAAHC works like a power player who only speaks in a whisper. You have to lean in.

The $540 million museum, which officially opens on Saturday, September 24, couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune moment. The twin missions embodied in its clunky name seem to speak directly to the events of this year. #Blacklivesmatter has foregrounded African-Americans’ continuous struggle for equality, making the museum’s history section painfully current, while African-American excellence in popular culture has never been more obvious—even as the push for representation on screen continues.

“We were all cursing when it didn’t open last year, but I think it has special power now,” says architect David Adjaye, the project’s lead designer. “Every generation thinks we know the story, we’ve grown past it, we’re integrated, we’re done, and then a decade later there is memory loss. We go back to stigmatizing and dividing. In the 18th and 19th century, museums were about understanding the world. Now [that] we understand the world, we have to understand each other.”