Mrs. Blakeley is exasperated.

“Wentzell’s took the couch a month ago and they said it would take only two weeks to make the slipcovers.”

“Well, if you can’t get it, you can’t,” Blakeley said… He put his hand on one of the large sliding panels of glass that made up the whole south side of the house and gave it a playful push. It responded with a quick, easy movement that made him smile with satisfaction.

In this brief opening exchange in Esther McCoy’s 1948 New Yorker short story, “The Important House,” we learn a lot about gender politics and the American home. While Mrs. Blakeley fusses powerlessly over décor (slipcovers which, we later discover, have a design of cornflowers, petunias, and primroses), Mr. Blakeley receives satisfaction from his sliding door, a integral part of the new California domestic architecture. Throughout the rest of the story, an account of a photo shoot for “House & Garden,” Mrs. Blakeley keeps trying to make her mark on the interiors, while her husband is free to admire the built-ins: “He was an aircraft engineer, and he liked the way the house worked.”

Faithful readers may recall that I spent a week in the Bay Area in January, researching a story on the urbanism of Silicon Valley. The story, which grew into a lengthy critical essay, was born out of the comments on my post on the ring-shaped design of Apple’s new headquarters. Commenters said, in nice and not-so-nice ways, that you can’t accuse a Silicon Valley company of being suburban, because there’s no other option. But why then, I wondered, were companies like Facebook importing the coffee shops and bike stores, cafe culture and farmers markets of the city to those suburbs? What did they see in the city and, seeing that, why wouldn’t they move there? You can finally download and read that essay, titled “The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism” here, where it is part of a series issued by the brand-new publishing house Strelka Press.

When I walked in to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest fashion exhibit, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations”, I wasn’t expecting architecture. The first room features an expanse of shiny black lacquer, and Judy Davis, playing Schiaparelli, speaking with five-foot red lips. I ignored all that.

Edith Wharton knows houses. Her first published book was “The Decoration of Houses,” written with Ogden Codman, Jr., which argued for “house-decoration as a branch of architecture,” and against “the indifference of the wealthy to architectural fitness.” Wharton and Codman took a reformist stance, suggesting that clients stop treating the interiors and the exteriors of their houses as separate projects and start seeking more simplicity and less ornament. Wharton had an opportunity to play architect and decorator herself in Lenox, Massachusetts, where (with the help of professionals) she built the Mount, a Georgian mansion with a cascade of beautiful gardens. She wrote to her sometime lover Morton Fullerton, “Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist, and this place, every line of which is my own work, far surpasses The House of Mirth… ”

Returning from a trip to Venice, I was afraid to write anything because it all seemed to have been said (worshipfully). While on my trip to Dallas for the David Dillon Symposium, I was afraid to say anything becuase it all seemed to have been said before (critically). The heat, the roads, the glassy towers…

Flying into Lego City on a Passenger Plane, you can see the city laid out below you in a grid: squares of green, wide roads of gray, and a tidy coastline of blue squares. It’s early, but already the Tipper Truck is out fixing the potholes and the Garbage Truck is collecting trash and recycling. At the Harbor, the crane is unloading goods onto a truck on the dock, while next door at the Marina the lifeguard is ready to go on duty. A high-speed Passenger Train is just pulling into the Train Station. And over at the Space Center, John Glenn will be happy to see that there’s a Space Shuttle awaiting its next trip to the International Space Station.

Safety is a watchword in Lego City. The Mobile Police Unit is ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice, should the Police Helicopter spot any illegal activities. It is hard to believe that any thieves could cross into Lego City, knowing the Forest Police Station is fully operational. And if the police, with their own helicopter and Jeep and a built-in holding cell, don’t catch the criminals, the bear (included) will.

Reyner Banham wasn’t cowed by many, but even he was nervous about meeting Esther McCoy. When he arrived in Los Angeles in 1965, it was five years after the publication of McCoy’s Five California Architects had given the contemporary scene a backstory, highlighting the careers of Greene & Greene, Irving Gill, Bernard Maybeck and R.M. Schindler. As Banham wrote, “Until about 1960, the rest of the world had practically no idea at all about architecture in California… Then this extraordinary book came out in 1960, and – suddenly – California architecture had heroes, history, and character.”

The Lowline (via New York Magazine)

What do these projects have in common? First, they are in famous cities. Second, they access hot-button urban topics: rooftop farms, reclaimed railroads, (self-reflexively) urban conversation itself. And third, they are gizmos. Critic Reyner Banham, in the oft-quoted essay “The Great Gizmo” posited that it wasn’t massive infrastructure projects that changed our world, but devices. Urbanism would lose out to industrial design. And that’s just what’s happening on Kickstarter. You wouldn’t Kickstart a replacement bus line for Brooklyn, but you might Kickstart an app to tell you when the bus on another, less convenient line might come. You can’t Kickstart affordable housing, but the really cool tent for the discussion thereof. Gizmo is close to gimmick, and worthy goals have to be dressed up in complex geometries for Kickstarter.

Affection isn’t a word often used to describe architecture criticism, but that’s the ruling emotion of Piecing Together Los Angeles, the first collection of the writings of California historian and critic Esther McCoy (1904-89). There’s McCoy’s affection for Los Angeles superstars like Charles Eames, Pierre Koenig and John Lautner when they were young and needed books like McCoy’s Five California Architects (1960) to give their work a backstory—and when they were old, and the world needed a reminder of their talents. (On Lautner: “Instead of repose, his houses are thorny with ideas, ideas that wake up the eye and astonish the mind.” On Ray Eames: “She had one of those minds that feasted on facts. Along with this was a sensibility that could transform facts into art.”) Reyner Banham called McCoy “the founding mother” and said, “She has the gift of friendship…and is profoundly concerned about people… and that is one of the special strengths she brings to her architectural writing.” This book, which collects McCoy’s never-finished memoirs, essays on three generations of California architects, fiction, and retrospective essays from the 1980s, is the product of editor Susan Morgan’s affection for McCoy’s whole project. The culmination may be her contribution to Blueprints for Modern Living, the catalog for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 1989 Case Study exhibition, published two months before her death.

Among the first essays I wrote for DO was a meditation on the festival marketplace, in January 2009. “Rebooting the Festival Marketplace” was inspired by my work with Jane Thompson on Design Research: The Store that Brought Modern Living to American Homes and my new knowledge about her and husband Ben Thompson’s pioneering work with adaptive reuse, waterfronts, and curated retail, long before that was a cliché. It was also inspired by the debate of the previous fall over then-South Street Seaport owner General Growth Properties’ plans for the uplands and Pier 17, designed by SHoP Architects in a medley of contemporary maritime references (hulls, sails, joists). Here’s an Architectural Record story on that plan from 2008.

I argued then that the festival marketplace was not a flawed concept, but that New York didn’t need one. New York acts as its own fair generator. In a later essay, “When Shopping Was Sociable,” I expanded my definition of Ben Thompson’s contributions to retail, and pointed out how and where I see his version of marketplace recurring.