I’ve often complained about the New Yorker’s coverage of design and architecture (Zaha Hadid: too personal; James Dyson: too gee-whiz). I must give credit where credit is due. Last week’s profile of Bottega Veneta designer Tomas Maier opens with a set of personal fusses with which I think most design people would identify, from a publicist who removes lint from writer John Colapinto’s suit (“If that’s there, he won’t be able to think of anything else.”) to the news that Maier removed the H from his first name to achieve lettristic balance (Oddly, I have also always found Tomas more attractive than Thomas).

The seventh edition of the New City Reader, the New Museum’s bold/nutty experiment in broadsheet journalism as part of their exhibition The Last Newspaper, is hot off the presses. Titled “UnReal Estate“ and edited by Mabel O. Wilson and Peter Tolkin, this edition tries to upend the domestic, postive, and lifestyle focus of the New York Times Real Estate section, by focusing on a few of the other possible meanings of the words. Here’s a Klaustoon included in the edition. Previous editions include “Sports,” featuring work by my colleague Mark Lamster.

Every year, like the changing of the seasons, someone on my neighborhood parents Yahoo group decides to take on the ice cream truck. It idles by the playground, polluting the air. It sells sugary treats. It is like baby crack. This year, one mother went so far as to post the ingredients in Mr. Softee, including the dread corn syrup, mono- and diglycerides, guar gum. “Not trying to start anything here, but thought I’d post should you want to know what’s in the Mr. Softee Ice Cream your
kids are eating,” she wrote, signing off, “respectfully.”

So it amused me no end when Natasha Case, co-owner of the Los Angeles-based Coolhaus ice cream truck, said she and partner Freya Estreller picked ice cream as their product of choice because “everybody loves it.” The truck’s name, a punny reference to Dutch superstar architect Rem Koolhaas, indicates their unfrozen agenda. Case has an architecture degree, Estreller is a real estate developer, and “Coolhaus was really about bringing architecture to the public, naming flavors after architects,” Case says. “When you sit down with a client about creating a home for them, creating a flavor for them is the same thing.”

Jam-making jams, fertilized grow pockets, edible schoolyards, skyscraper farms. Every day my Twitter feed, nominally devoted to design, architecture and media, brings me a stream of architectural platings, watch packaging that becomes a food bowl, sidewalks that sprout, bananas with logos. Right behind the question Why Design Now?—the theme of this year’s National Design Triennial—appears the question What to Eat Now? And designers seem to be throwing themselves at the answer for many of the same reasons. Now that we know we produce too much waste, now that aesthetics are suspect, now that we must compost or perish, how do design and architecture retool themselves for less, or better, or tastier consumption?

Well, we all have to eat.

I originally decided to include the Coolhaus truck in this article as linkbait—it couldn’t be cuter. Though their truck is often included in articles detailing architects’ retreat from a recession-damaged profession, I found Case ready with an argument for food trucks in general as urban architecture. “The beauty of it all is activating these public spaces that are so under-utilized and so underappreciated,” Case says, “We almost never get people complaining about waiting in line. They are standing in line, talking to friends, in outdoor spaces. In LA you don’t usually have this moment to interact.”
What Case said reminded me of sociologist William H. Whyte’s concept of “triangulation.” Whyte argued that people need some external stimulus, a third term in the meeting of strangers, to create chat, links, community. Ice cream triangulates, even in a vacant lot. Case thinks the pop-up nature of the truck, aided by social media, gives it an advantage over temporary-but-immobile urban farmers markets. Plus, she’s selling ice cream.

“Our sandwiches are handmade, with the best produce and dairy, real chocolate, fresh herbs and to me that’s healthier than weirdo non-fat cyberspace ice cream,” Case says. Case argues that you catch more flies with gelato than with kale, but among the growing members of the design-food nation, she seems to be in a minority.

Just this week GOOD sent out a call for a (much-needed) redesign of the food pyramid, remembered from grade school cafeteria walls. Two different professors at the North Carolina State College of Design have run studios on design and food systems, most recently one titled “Greening the Grocery Store” on recycling. New York City’s Department of Design and Construction recently issued guidelines on building buildings that encourage you to use to stairs. And there’s the general obsession with urban rooftop farming (never mind that most roofs aren’t strong enough for all that dirt). Sometimes it seems like Mayor Michael Bloomberg has enlisted the design professions as food police—and clearly not against their will.

I suspect many designers fall into what might be called the Whole Foods demographic. If they were eating brown rice sushi, shouldn’t they use their powers to bring it to the people? Save school kids from a lifetime of obesity? Green the food desert? An exemplary product for this theory was recently profiled in Rob Walker’s New York Times Magazine Consumed column, baby carrots (which have their own waste problems) repackaged and advertised like junk food. Design for food, yes. Improving health, yes. But is a parody of the clashing colors and energized typography of Doritos really making a difference? Are better graphics about nutrition going to make a teenager put down that soda? I found myself attracted to those design-food that had three-dimensional and emotional, impact, rather than just educational appeal. I mean, I find Alice Waters a little preachy and I subscribe to a CSA. Her first East Coast Edible Schoolyard will open in TK in a WORCac-designed building and mobile greenhouse—the political and physical environment in New York City required more explicit design than the Berkeley versions.

Fallen Fruit, for example, an LA-based artists collective, began mapping the public fruit trees in the city, combining urban geography with seasonal harvest. “Fruit is the food we trust the most in a way. Fruit has never been in the unhealthy category while everything else has gone through a series of fads,” says FF’s Matias Viegener. (I didn’t want to tell him about the anti-fruit juice brigade. Pure sugar.) This year, they were invited by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to do a series of exhibitions and installations inside and outside the museum, named EATLACMA. On August 1 they held Public Fruit Jam, a canning extravaganza where public and donated fruit was transformed into 12,000 jars of preserves. Is that design? Fallen Fruit would not claim it as such, but it seems to occupy the same triangulating realm as Coolhaus.

And Fallen Fruit’s biggest dream seems well within the realms of landscape architecture: the creation of new orchards in Los Angeles, streets lined with flowering trees, citywide picking parties. (Which also reminded me of my parents Yahoo group: every September a flood of requests for recommendations of apple orchards accessible via public transportation. If only Brooklyn streets were lined with apple trees…).

What Case and Fallen Fruit have found is that to work with food is to have an instant connection with people’s memories, tastes and feelings. Perhaps design needs food because we’ve fallen out of love with plastic, new chairs no longer make our hearts sing. Coolhaus’s ice cream sandwiches come in a soon-to-be-patented edible wrapper: food + design allows people to make things that will be used up, things that will be loved.

Dutch designer Marije Vogelzang’s whole practice is devoted to just these ephemeral and emotional ideas. Trained at Design Academy Eindhoven (where alumni include product design superstars like Maarten Baas, Tord Boontje, Marcel Wanders), Vogelzang now operates a studio and the restaurant Proef in Amsterdam, and describes herself as an eating designer to distinguish what she does (re-thinking the Dutch funeral meal, revamping hospital feeding schedules) from arranging food geometrically on the plate.

“So many design products that are made are a waste of material, but all the things I make will be wasted,” she says. “All designers want to make things for people but with food you can make something that people actually put inside their body. You eat something and get a memory of a long time past. You can play with that and can make people want something. It is about seduction. There is a big difference between a table that might be made of beautiful wood, and something emphemeral on the table.”

Vogelzang isn’t as explicitly political as the American designers, but her emphasis on emphemerality offers a very 1960s, conceptual art critique of the design world, and even more commercial designs for food. Recycled packaging is still packaging. The elevator will always be easier than stairs. Design can make healthy choices more appealing, but to me projects like the edible wrapper, extending the growing season with a mobile greenhouse, using food (and making food) to create public spaces people want to be together in move design closer to the heart of the matter, and fix physical problems created by nature or design in the past. It is carrots three ways: carrot cake ice cream, a freshly dug carrot you planted yourself, a crinkly bag of baby carrots. Which are you most likely to eat?

Warren Platner designed the American Restaurant in Kansas City in 1974 as part of a complex of modern buildings commissioned by the Hall family of Hallmark Cards. He described the bentwood, brass and lipstick-red interior as “like a huge lace Valentine.”

If you’ve ever wondered how we got from the glass boxes, stainless steel furniture, and white walls of the 1950s to the fern bars, wood paneling, and brass of the 1970s, Warren Platner is one answer. The career of the 
Connecticut–based architect and interior designer, who died in 2006 at age 86, spans the late 20th century’s architectural styles, from corporate modernism and sky-high restaurants to postmodern ferries. Not all of his work was good, or even in good taste, but it reveals a smart designer trying to avoid stagnation. Even when Platner went over the top (those dangling golden handkerchiefs at the Pan Am Building—–now the MetLife Building—–as part of a renovation in 1986 come to mind), there was always a clear architectural idea behind the glittering decoration.

What is most impressive about Alexander Girard’s mural for Deere & Co. is its material reality. The objects do speak for themselves. An accompanying catalog was to identify certain items, or groups of items, and to put them in historical context, but only a pedant would really require this. There is a historical sweep from left to right, from 1837, the year Deere invented the steel plow, to 1918, the year Deere moved to mass tractor production. Top to bottom, one sees Deere in context, the mundane and the domestic, the historic and the farm, for each decade. The multiple themes and levels of objects float past one another on pegs that stick out from the wall, so that Girard can layer two-and three-dimensional items without hiding any part of an artifact. In her joint biography, Pat Kirkham credits Charles and Ray Eames with inventing the “history wall” as a means of contextualizing a historical subject with objects, but the Eameses’ first three-dimensional mural, A Computer Perspective, was installed at IBM’s Madison Avenue gallery space in 1971. She notes that the couple was influenced by Girard, connected to them via their time in the Detroit suburbs and their designs for Herman Miller. The three also worked together on the 1955 exhibition Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India at the Museum of Modern Art. Girard designed the show, while the Eameses helped arrange the objects and created a short film of the result. Later, Girard would help Ray Eames find appropriate items for the couple’s 1965 show on Jawaharlal Nehru. All three were expanding upon ideas about display getting off the wall, pioneered by Herbert Bayer at the Bauhaus and deployed by Bayer at a series of shows at the MoMA in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The most obvious parallel was Bayer’s use of a wider range of vision than had been typically seen in exhibition design: rather than a line of images at eye level, he deployed objects and artwork across the entire visual/vertical plane. George Nelson’s 1953 book Display showed Bayer’s historical work, as well as a number of very similar systems of poles and scrims and shelves simultaneously developed by himself, the Knoll Planning Unit, Alvin Lustig, and others.

The living room has long been the basic set of the American sitcom, from “I Love Lucy” to “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Most of them are unmemorable, transitional spaces; every front door seems to open directly onto a generic sofa. Many of them are all but repeated from show to show (quick: what’s the difference between the living rooms on “Raymond” and “King of Queens”?). They’re invariably decorated in a neutral palette, acting as a quiet, passive backdrop to the action.

Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture and a New York-based architect, is famous for his broad palette of traditional styles that includes neoclassical, gothic and art deco. So it was no surprise to see his condominium tower at 15 Central Park West draw heavily on the classic prewar New York apartment, complete with crown molding and parquet floors.

Design Research closed its doors 31 years ago. Baby boomers remember the store like it was yesterday. D/R was where they bought their Marimekko dresses, the minute they realized a girdle was no longer required. D/R was where they touched the Kaj Franck china, buying one place-setting at a time for first apartments in Cambridge or San Francisco or New York. They copied its grand paper globes, bought rugs in Turkey to slip under their glass coffee tables, dangled wooden toys in front of their tots, and learned to make a mean tagine, using the same clay pot as Julia.

In 1950, industrial designers Mary and Russel Wright published the “Guide to Easier Living,” a handbook for the modern home intended to liberate women from old-fashioned formal entertaining, and families from old-fashioned and high-maintenance furniture.

What makes a landmark? Is it the stuff it’s made of? Or the goals of the architects who made it? In the case of the Inland Steel Building—a stainless-steel Chicago land-mark from 1958, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—these questions have become both practical and philosophical. In the lead-up to the building’s current renovation, architects, preservationists, and city and state officials all debated the future of the icon and whether continuity with the past meant keeping its material structure or innovating anew. The owner hired architects at SOM to create a master plan for retrofitting the building. They matched its original innovations in today’s terms—sustainability, flexibility, ease of use—and demonstrated the outer limits for LEED in a 52-year-old shell. Inland Steel has become a case study in what you can do to green a midcentury building, as well as what you can’t, economically and legally. As retrofits become more appealing—cheaper, greener—we may need to revisit the rules for bringing old buildings back to life.