Misha Gravenor for Metropolis Magazine

I never met Lucia Eames, but I always think of her as she appeared in the 1976 short film “The Chase,” a demonstration piece for the Polavision Instant Home Movie System. Of course an Eames home movie would have more style than anyone else’s. In the film, Lucia, looking like the Radcliffe graduate she was with glasses, long straight hair, and a denim skirt, is quietly reading on a blanket. The camera pans to a red leather diary, moments before a little boy with a blond bowl cut snatches it and runs away. She gives chase, following him into the Eames House, up the spiral staircase, out the upper story window, and up the Pacific Palisades bluff into which the house is set. In an instant you understand the section of the house, its tight spaces and two levels, its simple frame and idiosyncratic moments. Lucia and the boy are playing with the house and its site, revealing it though motion. One imagines Lucia’s children must often have been called upon to play, whether with toys, furniture, or Hang-It-Alls. She could, and did explain the point of her parents’ work through the simple step of living with it.

Xinhua/Eyevine/Redux

In an ideal world, the city would robustly maintain its own seventeen hundred parks without private donations. But that’s unlikely to happen—particularly not as the park budget stretches to accommodate newer parkland on difficult marine and brownfield sites, and has to react to natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy. A tithe, however, is not the only way that private money could make its way to smaller, poorer neighborhood parks.

Why shouldn’t we all have the chance to be John Paulsons, at a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, or ten thousand dollars a pop, giving to the parks and playgrounds in our own backyards via a network of Neighborhood Parks Conservancies? We would leverage our inherent narcissism to do some good for our daily lives, and the lives of others. The pitch: give to the park you visit every day, rather than the one you go to a couple of times a year.

A 1960s institution in Mexico that gives visitors space and time to wander is a stark contrast to the commodified museum experience that has become the norm.

Courtesy Architecture Now

The jury for the Pritzker Architecture Prize has named Shigeru Ban, Hon. FAIA, its 36th laureate, recognizing his material resourcefulness as well as his humanitarian mission as an architect. What the Pritzker Prize means to the industry changes each year with every successive selection (not to mention the architects passed over for recognition). ARCHITECT assembled four writers to break down what it all means: Alexandra Lange (Design Observer; 2014 Loeb Fellow at Harvard GSD), Christopher Hawthorne (Los Angeles Times), Mark Lamster (The Dallas Morning News), and Carolina A. Miranda (ARCHITECT).