LAST AUGUST, I WAS WALKING the Brooklyn Heights Promenade with my then three-year-old son, when he paused in front of a plaque showing the Manhattan skyline as it was, with the twin towers intact. Someone had hung an inexpensive wreath around the plaque that caught his attention. What’s this for? he asked. I could have said, I don’t know, but I realized the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 was weeks away. I wanted him to hear something about it from me first, not a classmate or a teacher.

It is in memory of those towers, I said. There was a terrible fire, and they fell down. Were there people in them? he asked. Yes, I said. Did they die? Yes, I said. Why didn’t they send the fire trucks? They did send the fire trucks, but they couldn’t help. The fire was too big. He was quiet for a moment, and I questioned my parental judgment in telling him even this limited account.

Then he said: Superman should have come to help the firemen. Superman could have saved the people. And he kept walking.

Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Review of Books published a longish essay I wrote on the Museum of Modern Art’s enornous, fascinating exhibition “Century of the Child: Growing By Design, 1900-2000,” curated by Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor. The exhibition, which includes over 500 objects from all fields of design, and is accompanied by a film series, runs through November 5. I had a rare struggle with the essay, torn between trying to discuss the themes of the exhibition, which are legion, and the trouble I had with its mode of presentation, which made those themes hard to surface. In the end, since most of the readers of LARB will not make it to MoMA, I decided to make a path through those 500 objects, highlighting about 20 that I thought told a story. That story was a melencholy one.

Jacqueline Neal in her apartment in the Pavilion building.

Lafayette Park in Detroit consists of three high-rises, 24 single-story courthouses and 162 two-story town houses, completed in the early 1960s. It was an urban renewal project built on land that was once a working-class black neighborhood. It was designed by one of the 20th century’s most famous modern architects, Mies van der Rohe.

All these elements have spelled disaster in other cities, and yet Lafayette Park has been a success, with high occupancy rates, a racially diverse population and a strong commitment to maintaining Mies’s architecture.

At the close of Nora Ephron’s 2010 book, I Remember Nothing, she included a list titled “What I Won’t Miss.” Down at the bottom, between “Small print” and “Taking off makeup every night” was this zinger, “Panels on Women in Film.” I like the way she capitalized the letters, capturing the organizers’ formal sincerity while maintaining her distance from the whole enterprise.

Next week, on October 3, I find myself playing both roles. I am the moderator for a panel titled Women in Design as part of New York and Dwell magazines’ weeklong City Modern series. The series includes discussions, lectures, panels and on the weekend of October 6 and 7, house tours. My panel, which should more properly be called Women in Architecture, features Galia Solomonoff, Marion Weiss and Claire Weisz. And the first question I am going to ask them is about Architect Barbie.

Exactly a year ago, I got an email from Alex Cornell, a writer and designer in San Francisco. He was assembling a book on overcoming creative block for Princeton Architectural Press (which has a very nice new Tumblr). The book was inspired by a post he wrote for ISO50, featuring advice from Nicholas Felton, Khoi Vinh, Ji Lee, Erik Spiekermann and many others, that generated 100+ comments. He wanted my advice too.

In 2010, in a preview of the Milan Furniture Fair, design critic Alice Rawsthorn asked: “Does the world need another chair?” When she asked the question, Jonathan Olivares had already embarked on a two-part answer: his book A Taxonomy of Office Chairs, published by Phaidon Press in 2011, and his chair in die-cast and extruded aluminium, introduced by Knoll at NeoCon in Chicago in June 2012. Olivares’s six-year-old award-winning practice is called Jonathan Olivares Design Research for a reason, as the two projects informed each other and resulted in a colourful, technically advanced, indoor/outdoor stackable seat the world might actually need.

The museum Edward Durell Stone designed at 2 Columbus Circle had a marble facade contoured to the odd shape of the tiny, curved block. Most of each side was solid, but arriving at the corner, the edges were perforated with holes, creating a dotty borner running all the way around the building. When the Museum of Arts and Design hired Allied Works to renovate and resurface the building, those porthole windows were the first to go, replaced by long, narrow strips of glass that afford a better view of the circular traffic, and which wrap up, down, and across the new walls and floors. Circles, the first-floor lollipops, the top-floor Venetian arches, all these vaguely Islamic touches were banished in favor of neo-modern linearity. Only in the basement auditorium do circles still reign.

On the Art21 blog, Richard McCoy has written a detailed post on the restoration of Milton Glaser’s “Color Fuses” mural, a site-specific work that wraps the first floor on the 1975 Minton-Capehart Federal Building in Indianapolis. Glaser worked with the building’s architect Evans Woollen, who McCoy quotes as saying he hoped the mural would make the structure “cheerful, disarming, fresh, welcoming, and inviting.”

The restoration, paid for with funds from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, looks gorgeous, and has the added benefit of a new lighting system for nighttime illumination that works the way Glaser always intended.

In the evening, the building’s entire loggia is encircled in light coming from the LED lamps. The building vibrates with color. If you watch closely, you see a wave of bright light slowly moving around the building, illuminating the bands of colors and then going dark. As the light washes over each color, they seem to come a little bit more alive. It all moves at about the pace of someone walking slowly past the building. The effect is impossible to fully capture in still photos, but can be understood better through video. The GSA has a page dedicated to the project, complete with a very good video.

As followers of my Twitter account know, I will retweet anything Glaser. But what struck me most about this story was the collaboration of designer and architect, and the integration of the art with the Brutalist architecture. Without this mural, and even with the mural faded and indifferently illuminated, this was a different building. It was a dark house without a welcome mat. A mass without a marked door. Another concrete building in a plaza. And it was never intended to be that way.

Some meta-criticism over the weekend, courtesy book critic Dwight Garner in the New York Times Magazine. In his Riff essay, “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical,” he suggests that respecting the effort that went into the creation of a work of art with generosity and silence will lead to the creation of a “zombie nation”: “a place no thinking person above the age of 7 would want to spend an afternoon.” I have to admit I found myself in the following description.

As you walk east along Atlantic Avenue, the new Barclays Center appears first as a dark shape on the horizon. Off center, a wrapped package with a mysterious silhouette. Coming closer, the foreground reveals itself as a long, paved triangle, an on-ramp to the steep planted wedge that forms the roof of the renamed Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center subway station. The roof of the arena dips down in welcome, its brow displaying the brand-new Barclays Center signs in Carolina blue, their color and serifed font making an uneasy contrast with the arena’s red-brown weathering-steel wrapper. The wrapper was designed by SHoP Architects, and the tough mesh speaks of the industrial past and the digital present, an image reinforced by the pulsing screens lining the cut-out entrance canopy. The Barclays logo speaks only of corporate branding, without a lilt. Given the bank’s recent scandals, it may be helpful that the signage can be switched out.

The arena itself cannot be switched out. After nine contentious years, it is here. My first reaction, standing opposite on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues is: it is big. Much bigger than I expected. The only arena that I am familiar with as a pedestrian is Madison Square Garden, a circular box in a forest of surrounding towers. You never see the bulk of it plain. On television, the cameras shoot arenas from above, turning surrounding parking lots into wallpaper, and emphasizing the shape and edge. But here there’s nothing to obscure, soften, or relate to the arena, which occupies more than a city block. The width of the surrounding streets allows the Barclays Center to stand in relief as the alien presence it is. The architect Gregg Pasquarelli recently described the arena to the New York Times as what might happen if “Richard Serra and Chanel created a U.F.O. together.”