Most visitors to the North Face store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan are looking for a parka. But several times a month, while working the door, manager Lucas Gustin spots people who don’t fit the brand’s usual demographic: “They are well-dressed, older,” he says. “They usually come in couples too. I’ll think to myself, OK, they are in here for the Bertoia.”

“The Bertoia” is sculptor Harry Bertoia’s largest extant U.S. work, a 70-foot-long, 16-foot-high steel screen, made of staggered golden rectangles interspersed with abstract forms resembling leaves and birds. It was specially commissioned by architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for 510 Fifth Avenue’s original tenant, Manufacturers Trust. It presides over the second floor of the building, once the primary banking hall, filling the eye as you travel up the east-west escalators. When the building opened in 1954, critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted the sculpture’s “Byzantine splendor,” while critic Lewis Mumford wrote that “it humanizes these quarters,” contrasting with the building’s cool metal, marble and grids. “It suggests something frail, incomplete … and thus lovable.” (A landmarks battle in 2011 mandated the screen’s return after renovations.)

That outerwear shoppers should have access to such grandeur may seem like a liability, but Gustin insists it is no trouble. A modest blond wood plaque, located at the north end of the screen, identifies the artist. “Little kids are always running around and they don’t touch it,” he says. “It is boldly silent.”

Illustration by Cathryn Virginia.

The narrow stretch that separates Quay Tower from a thatch of bamboo and oaks in Brooklyn Bridge Park doesn’t look like much, especially in winter. Unless you’re a bird.

To a bird, the copper-colored building’s glass is a mirror, reflecting the thick grove of trees and suggesting that the wilderness continues across the road. To a bird, that can be a deadly mistake.

“You see that reflection? To a bird that looks like a tree, that is a tree, and they will go right for the tree,” says Catherine Quayle, social media director at the Wild Bird Fund.

The surprising uptake of birding as a pandemic hobby, along with social media and data collection tools like eBird and dBird, has created new visibility for bird collisions with glass, which kill as many as 1 billion birds in the U.S. per year. At the same time, a new generation of urban parks has given birds more places to roost in highly populated areas. But something else has followed these parks as well: real estate capital. The vogue for urban parks creates more economic impetus to build shiny buildings with big windows opposite those urban wetlands, glades and groves.

Architects have known how to prevent their buildings from becoming bird killers for more than a decade: Toronto was the first North American municipality to implement bird safety building guidelines back in 2010. New York City implemented some laws of its own in 2021. Patterned glass, exterior screens and turning the lights off at night can all significantly reduce bird deaths. But those standards clash with the big glass and big views that clients associate with big money.

By Alexandra Lange and Mark Lamster

We’ve been doing this for twelve years now, and this was, without question, the hardest it’s ever been to come up with these “awards.” The year was grim from the start, and architecture was deeply implicated. It kicked off in January with the desecration of the Capitol, in June we had the catastrophic collapse of the Surfside condo tower, in August the Vessel closed after a fourth suicide, September brought the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, and through it all the pandemic has marched its way through the Greek alphabet. So yeah, it’s been a rough twelve months.

But it is the holiday season, a time for cheer, and we’re back with our review of the best and worst in architecture and design for 2021. And so … on to the fake prizes!

Is There Any Damn Place to Sit Down Here Award? To Diller’s Folly, a.k.a. Golf Tee Island, a.k.a. Little Island. The thing cost $250m and there’s not a bench in shade to be found. But lord is there a lot of fencing.

Design by Kovac Design Studio. Photo by Roger Davies.

Did we mention the 5,000-square-foot sun shade?

What does it take to make a getaway truly relaxing? For some people, it’s communing with nature. For other travelers, it’s spa services. For weekenders, it can be a home away from home. For Todd Feldman, a film and television agent at Creative Artists Agency, it was not having to choose. His seven-bedroom, 9,200-square-foot vacation house at the private Madison Club in La Quinta, California, designed by Kovac Design Studio and completed in 2020, is Palm Springs pad as boutique hotel, with Mad Men flourishes and a museum-worthy outdoor canopy, a bar ready for Out of Sight–level seduction, and a concession stand stocked for Fight Night.

“Often, when you’re lucky enough to be invited to someone’s place, there is that little bit of awkwardness,” Feldman says. “You get up in the morning, and if you are an early riser like I am, you’re standing there by the coffee machine and you haven’t yet brushed your teeth. Or even when you’re having a great night, some people want to go to bed a little earlier. There’s a push-pull.”

“Edith Farnsworth, Reconsidered,” an ongoing exhibit at the modernist house, shows the home as Edith Farnsworth inhabited it the 1950s, including furniture she sourced from the women-owned store Baldwin Kingrey. Photo by William Zbaren.

On Nov. 17, the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, took a new name: the Edith Farnsworth House. This five-letter change marks a small but significant gesture in the decades-long effort to tell the story of one of America’s most famous modern homes, designed by Mies van der Rohe, without silencing the woman who lived in it on her own, paid for it with her earnings as a physician, and eventually decided to sell it to someone who would ensure its preservation.

Renaming the Edith Farnsworth House is a high point in the efforts to diversify the sites that we preserve and the stories we tell about them — often by discarding the narrative of the solo male genius.

“The designers, the architects involved — in many instances those were women, or women were part of the team,” says Christina Morris, manager of the year-old “Where Women Made History” initiative for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns the Edith Farnsworth House. “They were the patrons, they were the owners. Women were responsible for creating the preservation movement and continue to lead it today.”

Frederick Law Olmsted envisioned Central Park as a place where access to nature could foster good health. Photo by Nisian Hughes/Stone RF.

A municipal Department of Care could make sure the trash was picked up and the tree pits were weeded. A Department of Care could pay teens to tend to public spaces and teach them stewardship skills. A Department of Care could check on seniors in a heat wave and basement apartment dwellers in a flood. A Department of Care would start by asking, as urban designer Justin Garrett Moore suggests: What do you need? What do you hope will change? How can we best accomplish this?

Of course, the Department of Care doesn’t exist — yet — but the concept of care as a driver for city planning is already gaining traction. Designers, planners, curators and historians are talking about care for an obvious reason: The pandemic exposed just how much labor is involved in child care, health care, street and park maintenance, and technological upkeep. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke last month at an event hashtagged #CareCan’tWait about the importance of fair pay and training for care workers — and Build Back Better could go even further.

Once people see it, the need for care is hard to unsee. In an architectural context, care links the labor of cleaning with the design of the surfaces to be cleaned, physical infrastructure with social services for its users, landscape with mental health. Care can be demonstrated through org charts and through organizing, through serving food and setting aside land to grow food, through creating public space and training people to take care of it. This is a lot to pile on to a four-letter word — care also has the potential to be just another buzzy term for the same old architecture.