All day yesterday on Twitter I was following along as Jessica Hische lettered a valentine for Marian Bantjes. The result, posted around 7 p.m. EST, was the kind of valentine most of us can only dream of making and receiving, and all the nicer for being an exchange of talent between friends. I grew up making valentines for friends and family members, sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, stacks of stuck-together doilies, piles of heart and cupid stickers, miniature flasks of Elmer’s glue, glitter, red paper, scissors. I would cut and stick and sprinkle to my heart’s content, and then watch as my mother inserted each artless creation into an envelope. We often bought the Love stamps to send them with, since we’re fussy that way, and I can remember disappointing pastel rose years, as well as a few graphic highlights.

If you write about design in New York City, and have been for some time, there’s no way you haven’t encountered Murray Moss. I must have interviewed him a dozen times, the highlight being a 2005 feature in New York Magazine on his own home (not as minimal as you might think. And those wires!). So I was sad to see the news that the real home of Moss, his store on Greene Street, was closing. Where would I go to see in person the objects I had only read about? It’s hard not to see the store’s closing as the result of the digital free-for-all of images (we’ve gotten less suspicious about buying after a virtual look) and prices (why pay New York retail when you can get it direct from Europe).

The only time I was able to enter the world of Moss was when I was spending other people’s money, a.k.a. when I got married, and registered there. I dearly love my Jasper Morrison Moon china, which to me was the epitome of what Moss stood for: the perfect plain thing. After that experience, I encountered many, many other designers who also registered at Moss. It was a rite of passage, choosing your grown-up things from Murray’s select group. That led to one of my favorite pieces I’ve written, and one of the first times I personalized my take on design. Copied below in full, in honor of the dream that was Moss: “Married With Tchotchkes,” from the October 9, 2005 issue of T Magazine.

I spent last week in the Bay Area, researching a story on the urbanism of high-tech campuses and eating lots of free corporate food. As part of my travels, I visited the site of what may have been the first building in Silicon Valley, IBM Building 25 in San Jose, CA. Building 25, built in 1957 and designed by John Bolles (best known today as the architect of Candlestick Park), was the first pixellated box in what became a vast field of patterned boxes, both at IBM and beyond, up and down highways 101 and 280.

In June, when Apple unveiled its donut-shaped, spaceship-suggestive headquarters in Cupertino, California, I took to my Design Observer blog to critique what I saw as its retrograde suburbanism. Companies have been plunking big geometric shapes in the countryside since the 1950s, simulating urbanism for their employees with cafeterias and bike shares, bowling alleys and snacks color-coded for health. For Apple to “think different,” I argued, the company would have to spend its dollars making Cupertino a more sustainable and urban place for all, not just the 12,000 with company IDs. Commenters immediately wrote back, accusing me of East Coast snobbery and, worse, irrelevance.

When are design critics like novelists? After the holidays, when they have to decide whether to offend the people that gave them gifts by reviewing them. So here’s my disclaimer, family members: I thank you for your generosity, and my children will play with everything you gave them to the best of their abilities and interest. But I can’t turn off the voice in my head.

Now that that’s out of the way, it is time for my annual post on the horrors of design for kids (previously: designer toys, baby clothes). This year, it is not just me that is talking about the gender gap when it comes to toys. The week before Christmas there was lively debate online about the news, via this Bloomberg BusinessWeek story, that Lego was creating a new line of pastel pieces for girls. Peggy Orenstein wrapped it all up in the New York Times on December 30.

The bulk of Alexander Girard’s work exists in a nameless field that synthesizes architecture, interior design, decoration and display. This adaptability and lack of snobbery put him at the center of the mid-century design world, working for the best clients and with the best colleagues. He used the same techniques and structures to organize the interior of J. Irwin Miller’s Eero Saarinen-designed home (1955) as he did to launch Herman Miller’s first and only retail shop, Textiles and Objects (1961). It was this self-effacement, personal and architectural, that allowed items as diverse as Eames chairs and Mexican ceramics, Indian rugs and early threshers all to look at home, and like objects of high design, in a Girard display. Girard was interested in important areas many architects eschew: texture, shape, tiny accessories, while simultaneously being a master of layered, gridded orthogonal space.

When my mother replaced her furnace eight years ago, she begged the HVAC guy to let her keep her old thermostat. After all, it wasn’t just any thermostat: it was a vintage 1950s Honeywell Round, designed by Henry Dreyfuss, and likely installed when the house was built. If you grew up in an old house before the 1980s, the Round is a thermostat, in the same way the brown-marbleized box of Kleenex is tissues. Sad to say, the Round was incomptible with her contemporary heating system, and now she has a white textured-plastic box, with tiny buttons and a digital readout.

These plastic boxes, today’s generic, were and are multiple steps backward. And someone finally noticed: former iPod hardware designer Tony Fadell, who created a new company to produce the Nest. A round thermostat, 60 years later and, at $250, unlikely to ever become the new Kleenex.

Just before Thanksgiving, I had the opportunity to tour the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) exhibition, Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design, with curators Jeannine Falino and Jennifer Scanlan. The moment I walked in, I was a little bit embarrassed I hadn’t been before, as the opening vignette features a large, pristine piece of Irving Harper‘s “China Shop” fabric, designed while he was working for George Nelson. Given my obsession with midcentury and architectural textiles, what took me so long? The argument of the show is that modernism wasn’t a one-way industrial street, and that, during the 1950s and 1960s, there was a great deal of back-and-forth between craft and design, the rough and the smooth, and there is a tremendous amount of eye candy, including Betty Cooke and Art Smith jewelry). DCrit graduate Chappell Ellison has written an excellent summary of the show over on the Etsy blog, so I won’t do that. Collapsing the boundaries between craft and machine, and versing designers in multiple disciplines is part of the legacy of the Bauhaus. And indeed, Dorothy Liebes’s experiments with Lurex and natural fibers and close cousins of Anni Albers’s earlier experiments in wool and cellophane.

How will 2011 be remembered in architectural history? A year in which the public reclaimed public space? The last hurrah of starchitectural extravagance? After long deliberation, our intrepid interlocutors offer you their awards for the year.

I love this kitchen. Everything has its place. Everyday supplies within reach. Coffee over the coffee pot. Can opener at the ready. This is a modernist’s dream, but also a housewife’s dream. This photograph is from a small, charming new book titled Eames + Valastro: Design in the Life of an American Family. In it, Eames collector and historian Daniel Ostroff interviews the sons of the owner and creator of that kitchen, Gladys Valastro. Their interview is the story of the nine pieces of Eames furniture that their parents bought in 1954, but more importantly, the story of living as with design as a middle-class American family. Turning a fiberglass rocker into a turtle. Surfing a molded plywood coffee table. Sleeping a baby in the drawer of an ESU. Once upon a time these pieces weren’t icons, and it is important to be reminded that they could take it. I see this book as part of a larger reconsideration of the Eameses, including the huge monograph of last winter (which I reviewed critically here), and the new documentary Eames: The Architect and the Painter (which Martin Filler reviewed critically here). I’ll definitely write about the film when I see it.