A wall sculpture by Ruth Asawa from her Christie's exhibition this spring. A reminder to be thorny.

As the year-end and best-of lists rain down, I have been thinking of my own highlight reel. For me it was a year of women. Maybe I was finally old enough to embrace the perspective that comes with my gender, or maybe it happened to be the year when a lot of other people started counting the number of women in architecture, in design, in technology, and in the media, on panels, in the history books, on editorial pages. I’ve always believed that you have to choose your own heroines. This year I made imaginary mentors out of a few new ones, as well as finally writing something personal about the woman that inspired me to be an architecture critic in the first place. Ten stories circling that theme.

Deborah Sussman with fellow members of the Eames Office wearing July 4th glasses she designed (c. 1965)

This December, Woodbury University’s WUHO Gallery will host the first retrospective of designer Deborah Sussman‘s early work, which ranges from games for the Eames Office to the 1984 Olympic Games. The exhibition, co-curated by Catherine Gudis, Barbara Bestor, Thomas Kracauer, and Shannon Starkey, will include objects, images and sketches. In light of the renewed interest in Los Angeles’s contributions to the visual arts, headlined by the city-wide and Getty-funded Pacific Standard Time and PST Presents exhibitions of the last two years, this seems like an ideal moment to take a closer look at a career that spans many scales and movements. The curators need help to make the show an immersive experience worthy of Sussman, and have launched a Kickstarter to fund mounting, screenprinting and associated programming. It ends November 24.

To add context to the Kickstarter pitch, I asked two of the organizers, architect Barbara Bestor and curator Shannon Starkey, to put Sussman in context. Why does L.A. love her?

James Turrell, "Twilight Epiphany" (2012). Photo by Paul Hester, courtesy Rice University

A Tale of Two Signs: James Turrell’s latest skyspace, “Twilight Epiphany,” and the newly renovated Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston demonstrate how art can animate and reshape campuses.

Like the Nieman Marcus catalog, the Rockettes, and Mannheim Steamroller, the Lunch With The Critics Year-End Awards has become a holiday tradition, beloved and hotly anticipated. Our intrepid critics, Alexandra Lange and Mark Lamster, did not let geography deter them from returning for the fourth year in a row to celebrate (and castigate) the best and worst architecture and design of 2013. This year’s list of winners and losers follows. You’ll have to imagine their surprise.

When The Hunger Games was released in 2012, as design critics we found its Francophile fashion, its Frank Gehry-inspired architecture, and its streamlined technology difficult to ignore—or admire. If this was the future, why did the Capitol look like the 1980s? Do we overlook evil if it’s not dressed up like Fascism? Where did Katniss get that perfectly faded housedress? Naturally, when Catching Fire came out last month, we had to go back for more.

Warning: spoilers from both books and both films ahead.

Instagram/Alexandra Lange

If I were to write a romantic comedy set in Silicon Valley today, the opening shot would be of a sunrise—backlit against some pastoral piece of California coast, a man and a woman hold coffee, not hands. As the camera moved closer, you would hear their conversation and realize that this was not a morning-after ramble, but merely the first in a series of walking work meetings. In lieu of Starbucks cups, the not-holding hands would be carrying smartphones. You can imagine the rest.

Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital (1975) in Chicago met the wrecking ball on October 11, after a lengthy and bizarre process, involving landmark status approved and revoked, a mayoral op-ed, and little kids in preservation t-shirts. They were born at Prentice, and in the hospital’s destruction, they may have learned their first political lesson. It was a sad day for Modernism, and a sad day for common sense: Northwestern University’s insistence that they needed that site and no other for a new biomedical lab never held up to scrutiny. It would be nice to think that Prentice would be the last structurally daring, imaginatively conceived concrete building clawed to rubble, but it probably won’t be. Something more beautiful has got to go.

Bryan Boyer's workspace, October 2013, from his Flickr set, How We Work (All rights reserved by bryanboyer)

Rena Tom and Bryan Boyer have been thinking about how freelancers work, personally and professionally, for much of their careers. Rena owned and operated the cult design store and gallery Rare Device, and has also worked as a designer of jewelry, stationery and web pages. Bryan, trained as an architect, was most recently Strategic Design Lead at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. Among his projects there was Brickstarter, about which I wrote here. But rather than industrial design machines like cubicles, cases or office landscapes, they’ve created an idiosyncratic place to which freelancers can bring their laptops, headphones, and caffienated beverages. A space in which, they hope to create a sense of community and strenth in numbers.

One of the incidental pleasures of Judith Major’s new book on pioneering architecture critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer is the glimpse it gives into the life of a cultural journalist at the turn of the past century. Van Rensselaer often referred to herself as the “breadwinner” of the family. “Did she really need the money is beside the point. Van Rensselaer simply wanted to be treated as a professional and to be paid the same as male critics,” Major told me. “She asked Century editor Richard Watson Gilder in 1897 for the going rate of $30 per thousand words — approximately $760 today.”

The key line in the introductory wall text at the Museum of Modern Art’s new installation, “Designing Modern Women, 1890-1990” is this: “The objects, design drawings, posters, and films on view in this gallery, all drawn from the Museum’s collection, showcase women’s creativity not only as professional designers, but also as clients, consumers performers, and educators.” This redefinition of the limits of design practice is long overdue.