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.

Three reissued Braun alarm clocks (clock of my dreams, far left)

I am one month into my Loeb Fellowship at Harvard, and I still haven’t read a book. But I am learning a great deal from sitting in on a number of classes across the university, both about pedagogy and the theory (oftentimes entire academic disciplines) behind the work I have been doing for the past ten years as a critic. I want to take this post to write it all down, both so I don’t forget, and so that I can share. (If you are interested in what I will be doing, video of my introductory talk from Sept. 13 can be found here.)

Dan Barasch, the co-founder of the Lowline, gets calls all the time from people who think his underground “culture park” already exists. In fact, the project’s successful 2012 Kickstarter campaign was only the first step in the old-fashioned process of politicking, fundraising and engineering. A year later, a look at the renderings versus reality, and the ongoing question of what exactly the Lowline will be.

Landscape architect Gary Hilderbrand’s collage Glass House Reflections II (2012)

“Composite Landscapes: Photomontage and Landscape Architecture,” Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, closes Sept. 2. Catalog is to be published in January 2014.

“Cut n’ Paste: From Architectural Assemblage to Collage City,” Museum of Modern Art, through Dec. 1

This summer two very different institutions produced parallel exhibitions on the art of collage and architecture. At the Museum of Modern Art, “Cut ‘n’ Paste” prepared a modernist history of collage, giving pride of place to Mies van der Rohe’s large photo collages, then mixing in postwar graphic design, contemporary photo-manipulation, and projections of digital renderings on a movable scrim. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, “Composite Landscapes” offers a similarly interdisciplinary look at the history of landscape collage, mixing working drawings and client-driven renderings with Mrs. Gardner’s travel scrapbooks and artist-made collages. Seeing them both suggests common themes as well as opposed approaches to envisioning and embracing landscape.

From left: Ray Eames; Denise Scott Brown; Jeanne Gang

“Women are the ghosts of modern architecture, everywhere present, crucial, but strangely invisible,” writes historian Beatriz Colomina in “With, Or Without You,” an essay in the Museum of Modern Art’s 2010 catalog, Modern Women. “Architecture is deeply collaborative, more like moviemaking than visual art, for example. But unlike movies, this is hardly ever acknowledged.” Colomina goes on to chronicle the history of modernism’s missing women, acknowledged, if at all, as working “with” Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, or Charles Eames. To put yourself in the shoes of Lilly Reich, Charlotte Perriand, and Aino Aalto, simply watch the cringe-worthy video of the Eameses on the Home show in 1956, Ray introduced as the “very capable woman behind him” who enters after Charles has bantered with host Arlene Francis.

This spring, these ghosts came back to haunt us: Arielle Assouline-Lichten, a student at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, read excerpts from an interview with Denise Scott Brown in which she mentioned her own absence from partner Robert Venturi’s 1991 Pritzker Prize. “They owe me not a Pritzker Prize but a Pritzker inclusion ceremony,” Scott Brown said. “Let’s salute the notion of joint creativity.” Assouline-Lichten had just relaunched the Women in Design student group at the GSD with Caroline James; she emailed James, they drafted a petition, and three hours later the call for recognition of Scott Brown by the Pritzker Committee was live at Change.org. By late May the petition had more than 12,500 signatures, including nine Pritzker recipients: Robert Venturi (“Denise Scott Brown is my inspiring and equal partner”); Rem Koolhaas (“an embarrassing injustice”); and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Colomina wrote simply, “We are all Denise.”