Sans Serif Seasons Greetings

'Tis the season when the minds of parents of small children turn to holiday cards. What are the mass market choices for the design-minded?

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Criticism Kerfuffle 2010

I am torn about entering Criticism Kerfuffle 2010, entertained in Blueprint, BLDGBLOG, Words in Space and Urban Omnibus. There's fair, if not universal, agreement that more thoughful architectural criticism would indeed be a good thing. But it isn't just the writing that's the problem.

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New City Reader: Sidewalk Sale

How the Vanderbilt railyard became Atlantic Yards became downtown Brooklyn became the Barclays Center, lost and gained an architect and a developer, won an NBA franchise, and disappeared from Brooklyn in the process.

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My Marimekko Uniform

When Marimekko came to America in 1959, the dresses freed women from girdles and garter belts and hose. Today wearing Marimekko is like being a walking work of art.

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Dan Wood

Since 2003, WORKac's research and teaching have focused on questions about ecology and urbanism. They first explored these issues in three dimensions with their winning entry for the MoMA/PS1 Young Architects Program in 2008: PF1, or “Public Farm 1,” a reinvention of the summer pavilion as a working farm made of cardboard tubes. In October, the first phase of the studio's Edible Schoolyard New York City opened at P.S. 216 in Gravesend, Brooklyn.

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You Have to Pay for the Public Design

On the uncertain future of Harry Bertoia's bronze screen on Fifth Avenue, Ada Louise Huxtable said it best. But I am still thinking about Bertoia, public modernism, and how we like our design. My conclusion: we like our chairs better than our museums, or hospitals, or public sculpture.

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Ornament & Time

The minute we got to Copenhagen, I noticed the clocks. Fragments of unself-conscious and applied ornament that seemed to shrug off the anxieties of the Bauhaus or Corbusian strains of modernism.

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Super 8

Here we build our glass houses for rich people, with a view, along the lines of 100 Eleventh Avenue or On Prospect Park. In Copenhagen the idea seemed to be glass houses for families, a radiant city built by many hands, most with the same aesthetic.

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Keeping Faith

Sometimes I feel as if all I ever am is cranky about architecture. But a recent trip to Scandinavia, gave me new answers if someone asks me what it is I am looking for.

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GourmetLive: The Architecture of Food

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.

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Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic, and author of Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities. (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in The Architect's Newspaper, Architectural Record, Dwell, Metropolis, Print, New York Magazine and The New York Times.

Recent Book

Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities
Alexandra Lange
Princeton Architectural Press, 2012
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Design Matters Interview

Alexandra Lange and Jane Thompson

In this podcast interview with Debbie Millman, Alexandra Lange and Jane Thompson discuss their new book, the store Design Research, creating the power of imagination, Marimekko, Sir Lady Jane and Benjamin Thompson.