Designer Todd Oldham has made recent plays for both the DIY market (with Handmade Modern) and the boutique baby market (with Charley Harper ABCs and 123s). For this holiday season, he tries to appeal to both at once with Kid Made Modern, 52 projects “inspired by mid-century modern design” for children 5 and up. As a mom who considers herself crafty and admires midcentury modern, I simply had to get my hands on it. There is a long history of designers applying their critical eye to the world of children — Charles and Ray Eames made films that are genuinely appealing to children, most notably Toccata for Toy Trains — but so many other “modern” toys seem much more appealing to parents than to kids. My son never uses the minimalist black Brio shape sorter I bought, preferring the plastic Fisher Price versions at other people’s houses. Was this book just for the junior coffee table, or could it offer elementary-schoolers a sense of the midcentury world? I decided to take it for a test-drive.

My husband has been saying for years that brass would come back. Not out of any particular love for the alloy, but because he saw that hardware trends were cyclical, chrome rising and falling in popularity, to be replaced by brushed stainless steel, then a brief flirtation with nickel, and so on. There really aren’t that many metal options, so surely brass’s time would come again. Initially this seemed impossible, since when most of us think of brass, we think of Trump Tower, ersatz gold, weightless flash, bad taste.

When Aline met Eero in January 1953, she was the associate art editor and critic for the New York Times, recently divorced, and on a trip to Detroit to meet the young architect whose General Motors Technical Center had proved to be such a smashing success. She was to write a profile of Saarinen for the New York Times Magazine, eventually published on April 23 as “Now Saarinen the Son” with the byline Aline B. Louchheim. A little over a year later she would become Aline B. Saarinen.

I never thought I would say this about a work by Thom Mayne of Morphosis, but I think 41 Cooper Square is too small. Cooper Union’s new, sustainable academic building on Third Avenue is nine stories, 175,000 square feet, takes up an entire city block, and yet, with all the other wonderful and terrible architecture happening on the Bowery and its side streets (the Cooper Square Hotel’s tower version of Frank Gehry’s IAC Building, Herzog and de Meuron’s disco-visionary 40 Bond, Foster + Partners’ Sperone Westwater Gallery) it blends right in. All the photographs I had seen, most taken from the air, made it look like another Mayne Death Star, a chunk of some intergalactic space ship deposited here for repairs (there is that nasty cut across the front).

“The park should, as far as possible, complement the town. Openness is the one thing you cannot get in buildings. Picturesqueness you can get. Let your buildings be as picturesque as your artists can make them. This is the beauty of a town. Consequently, the beauty of a park should be the other.”
Frederick Law Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” (1870)

In Frederick Law Olmsted’s writings about parks, one can hear the sweat of his brow. We’ve become so accustomed to the Olmsted style of park: open greenswards, thickets of trees with curving walks, rambles of greater “wildness,” that they just seem natural. But they are as constructed, and as theorized, as any building. It was his genius to make them seem easy, and thus to allow the masses to move at their ease through his additions to the urban landscape. His parks (the most famous designed with British architect Calvert Vaux) had an agenda, one which derived directly from the idea of the park as a complement to, but ever different from, the town.

The High Line in Manhattan, whose first section opened Monday, would seem to be Olmsted’s nightmare. Built atop an abandoned railroad trestle, it is long and narrow. There is no room for a lawn, the soil is too shallow for big trees, and the city presses in, sometimes closely, sometimes from afar, at every point. There is nowhere to forget where you are, who you are, where you have come from, in the way Olmsted hoped Central Park would (a thought borrowed from A. J. Downing), wiping away class distinctions with fresh air and free admission. The High Line goes against all Olmsted’s principles, and yet reveals what we take for granted in larger more pastoral parks.

From the earliest days of the High Line, the new park being built from a 1.5 mile abandoned elevated rail line on Manhattan’s west side, its future was literally entwined with that of hotelier Andre Balazs’s first ground-up property, the Standard New York. The High Line passes through two other former industrial buildings, but the Standard is and likely will be the only structure built fresh over the former railbed, a portal over the park’s entrance seen in segments as you walk up Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s southernmost “slow staircase.” Other buildings touch the tracks, but the 20-story hotel straddles them. So it was with some relief that, as the hotel took shape, one could see that its concrete legs looked both shapely and tough, its underside crisply detailed and without fuss. The twinkling begins above, where the frame is filled with glass and bent at the center, so that the smaller operable windows sparkle within the grid.

Once upon a time in the 1970s, the festival marketplace was a treat. Its co-inventor, architect Benjamin Thompson, wrote: “The natural pageantry of crowds and goods, of meat, fish and crops from the fields, of things made and things grown, all to be tasted, smelled, seen and touched, are the prime source of sensations, experience and amusement in the daily lives of whole populations — were and still are, in most nations except our own.” Faneuil Hall, which opened in Boston in 1976, was his riposte to dying urban downtowns and everywhere-the-same malls. It was supposed to be more than commerce. It was an everyday fair.

When you are a design critic and a new parent, your first encounter with much of baby world leads to many questions. Why does every toy come in three primary colors, rather than a single hue? Why so bulbous? Why does it need to light up/sing “Old McDonald”/moo? My first encounter with the expanded Brooklyn Children’s Museum, which reopened in Crown Heights this September, made me ask almost the same questions—and with the same fear of being a spoilsport.

The interim logo for JetBlue’s new Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy Airport showed the abbreviation T5 rising like a phoenix behind the iconic roofline of Eero Saarinen’s 1962 TWA Terminal. The graphic expressed a literal truth: the new $743 million, 26-gate terminal sits directly behind TWA, embracing it with a series of gently curved roadways and a façade of dark gray steel and glass. It also expressed the hopes of many in the preservation community that TWA (or at least its spectacular reinforced-concrete symbol) would live, making flying seem as glamorous as it had in the 1960s, when jet travel was a breathless innovation.

For those of us who try to resist conspiracy theory’s undertow, the March 21 news that all parts of Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project but the arena are “stalled” was a definite blow. No “Miss Brooklyn,” the mixed-use tower set to be the tallest in Brooklyn. No residential towers, containing 6000 market-rate and middle- and low-income affordable condominiums and rentals. And no new, lower-rise neighborhood organized around an eight-acre Olin Partnership-designed park. Instead, Brooklyn might just get the kind of sitting-duck arena that has failed so often in urban settings (see Madison Square Garden, soon-to-be demolished until the same economic crunch that stalled Atlantic Yards did the same to the Moynihan-Penn Station redevelopment).