My family spent spring break in Venice, along with an international crowd of vacationers. It seems impossible to say anything about Venice that hasn’t been said before (and in fact, the center city seemed like an excellent example of cupcake urbanism, all masks and gelaterie and Bellinis) but because of the glories of Carlo Scarpa, I’m going to try.

I finally had the opportunity  to visit three of Italian modernist architect Scarpa‘s major works in Venice: the Olivetti showroom of 1957-58, the Querini Stampalia Foundation of 1961-63, and the Museo Correr of 1957-60. About ten years ago, my husband and I drove around the Veneto in search of Scarpa and Palladio, so this was the completion of a very worthwhile architectural quest. What wasn’t clear to me when we saw Scarpa’s other works, including the Brion Family Cemetery and the sublime Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, was how influenced Scarpa was by Venice’s peculiar approach to architecture, and how the quirks of his practice – his appreciation for relics, his asymmetric and textured approach to facades, the intricacy and gleam of his detailing – are a 20th-century reaction to that particularity.

No, not together.

This week I had the pleasure of writing about two seemingly opposed design artifacts: the gorgeous architectural photography of Pedro E. Guerrero, who worked with Frank Lloyd Wright for 20 years and palled around with the Harvard Five in New Canaan, CT, and the dystopian future presented in the movie version of the best-selling young adult novel The Hunger Games.

The first piece is a Q&A for the New York Times “Home” section, and I found the 94-year-old Guerrero to be in fine form, still creating art in the form of junk sculpture. The first career retrospective of his work opens April 5 at the Woodbury Hollywood Gallery in Los Angeles, curated by Anthony Fontenot and Emily Bills (coincidentally, a classmate and friend from my days at the Institute of Fine Arts). He had a lot to say about the architects and sculptors whose work he photographed, including Breuer’s first Connecticut house. One memory, cut for space in the Times, was of his first encounter with Alexander Calder.

Mr. Guerrero’s photograph of the Ingalls rink at Yale, designed by Eero Saarinen.

The architectural photographer Pedro E. Guerrero was a contemporary of the more famous Julius Shulman and trained at what is now the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. After World War II, he lived in New Canaan, Conn., where he photographed the work of modern architects like Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen and Philip Johnson for House & Garden, Vogue and other magazines. And later in his career, he documented the work of the sculptors Louise Nevelson and Alexander Calder.

But Mr. Guerrero, 94, is best known for his 20-year friendship and working relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright, his first client. A number of his portraits of Wright, including a series of 12 images of the architect’s hands demonstrating the difference between organic and conventional architecture, will be on display at the Woodbury Hollywood Gallery in Los Angeles, as part of a career retrospective — Mr. Guerrero’s first — organized by the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University. The show, curated by the institute’s director, Emily Bills, and Anthony Fontenot, runs April 5 to 25.

We spoke with Mr. Guerrero by phone from his home in Florence, Ariz., where he was sorting through his archive of back issues of Architectural Record and House & Garden, reminiscing about some of the images that will appear in the exhibition.

After two weekends of The Hunger Games’ box-office domination, it may seem as if every last thing about the film has been said. But we noticed an omission. While everyone was gossiping about Jennifer Lawrence’s weight, they forgot to consider her arrows, her windbreaker, and the Cornucopia they came from. As design critics, we were struck by the film’s architecture, industrial design, and fashion—lethal and otherwise. The following dialogue ensued.

Be warned: spoilers ahead.

A dancer in a liquid, backless dress stares at herself in a horizontal mirror, feet resting on a black square of a checkerboard floor. Also reflected in the mirror: the curving tubular steel of a cantilever chair, its seat daringly upholstered in a tiger stripe. Where are we? The woman, possibly weeping, could be Dietrich. The furniture, possibly a knock-off, could be Breuer, But we’re a long way from the Bauhaus. It’s a photograph by Hamaya Hiroshi from 1935, taken at Tokyo’s Ballroom Florida dancehall. In one image there’s Hollywood glamor, modernist furniture, the dawn of photojournalism and some out-of-context American tourism (“Florida” was, in fact, copied from a Parisian dancehall of that name).

For my class this week I assigned Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas,” a 1968 chapter that sets out their Las Vegas project in bite-size form. In re-reading it, I remembered the description of the typical exterior Vegas form (road, sign, parking lot, building), but not their pointed analysis of the casino interior, or their distaste for the single, bewitching idea modernists take from the past: the piazza. In Vegas, to their joy, unnamed casino architects have managed to make the piazza their own in the form of the patio.

Buildings are everywhere, large and small, ugly and beautiful, ambitious and dumb. We walk among them and live inside them, largely passive dwellers in cities of towers, houses, open spaces and shops we had no hand in creating. But we are their best audience. Owners, clients and residents come and go, but architecture lives on, acting a role in the life of the city and its citizens long after the original players are gone. We talk (in person, on blogs) about homes as investments, building sites as opportunities, unsold condominiums as an economic disaster, but all of that real-estate chatter sidesteps the physical reality of projects built and unbuilt. Rather than just talking about money, we should also be talking about height and bulk, style and sustainability, openness of architecture and of process. Design is not the icing on the cake but what makes architecture out of buildings, what turns them into places we want to live and eat and shop rather than avoid. Architecture critics can praise and pick on new designs, but their readership has lately been too limited. We need more critics — citizen critics — equipped with the desire and the vocabulary to remake the city.

Last week, the Museum of Modern Art opened “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream,” the second in an ongoing series of exhibitions exploring issues in contemporary architecture through what might be termed extreme charretting. The first exhibition in the series, “Rising Currents,” looked at how architecture and landscape architecture might react to and mitigate rising sea levels in New York Harbor through adaptive, “soft” infrastructure. (When Hurricane Irene came to town last August, it all seemed very prescient.) But even before that dodged bullet, “Rising Currents” succeeded in combining design and the public in multiple ways. Teams worked out loud at PS1, giving midstream presentations of their research; the project generated ideas that were then studied (at least) by public officials; MoMA’s Architecture and Design department injected itself into a broader public discourse than it had for some time. It seemed like a fresh and winning formula (Mimi Zeiger’s optimistic review for Places is here).

I grew up watching Masterpiece Theater (and once impersonated Alistair Cooke for a multi-media presentation by my mother), so the current popularity of Downton Abbey, which concludes its second season on Sunday, Feb. 19 in the United States, comes as little surprise to me. I’ve been watching versions of this show, and reading its novelistic forebears, since I was 12. Is there anything better than romance and fancy clothes? I feel like I’ve never not known what a shirtwaist was.

Updates this week on two design stories I wrote about last year. I hope a little outrage is healthy.

First, it is not only me that noticed the operational similarities between the Henry Dreyfuss-designed Honeywell Round and the new Nest thermostat. This week, Honeywell sued Nest for patent infringement. Most of the cited patents had to do with new technologies involving the way the thermostat learns your heating and cooling habits, and a “natural language installer” that asks the owner questions rather than having you punch complicated combinations of buttons, but two of them, 7159789 and 7159790, date from the 1930s to the 1950s, when Honeywell’s engineers were working with Dreyfuss to make the thermostat more intuitive.