James R. Thompson Center by Helmut Jahn. Photo by David Kasnic.

Lee Bey stood under the rotunda at the James R. Thompson Center, 13 stories of mirror-glass balconies rising around him in tiers, and shiny elevators (now off-limits without official business) zipping up and down.

The idea of the center, which opened in 1985 at the corner of Clark and Randolph streets, was to make a new indoor civic space downtown, with state government offices supported by the retail outlets and a food court. You can get a marriage license here. You can also eat at Taco Bell. “It embodies the idea of transparent democracy,” he said. “You can see all the elements at work.”

Even the so-bad-they-are-good 1980s colors in the atrium have meaning: “It takes the elements of a traditional government building” — the dome, the flag — “and plays with them. The red, white and blue becomes a salmon and a teal.”

In the film, activist Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones) rallies protesters in front of a triumphal arch—an echo of famous photos of Jane Jacobs at Washington Square. Photo by Glen Wilson.

Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn, follows the gumshoe Lionel Essrog as he attempts to find the murderers of his boss and mentor, Frank Minna. In his quest, he is both helped and hindered by his Tourette’s syndrome. The reader is taken on a ride through his “ticcing” brain as well as the dark contemporary city, centered in Brooklyn, where the orphaned Lionel grew up in a Catholic boys’ home and Minna ran his small-time detective agency.

In Edward Norton’s long-gestating film version, released earlier this month, the calendar has flipped from the 1990s back to the 1950s. The movie’s heavy is a version of a figure who should be very familiar to Curbed readers: Robert Moses, standing astride the city and destroying brownstone neighborhoods in the name of progress. Norton’s character, however, is not a Robert Moses facsimile, but a man named Moses Randolph (played by Alec Baldwin). But for the close watcher, Randolph’s office in the shadow of the Triborough Bridge, his love of swimming, and his fistful of mayoral appointments all hew close to the real Moses’s biography.

If Curbed could start its own Pop-Up Video series, this film would make a terrific first episode.

Critic Alexandra Lange talked to Edward Norton—who wrote, directed, produced, and stars in the film as Essrog—about film noir, fictional villains, and planning for the people. Spoilers ahead.

Louis Kahn's Korman House, photo by Chris Mottalini.

I was asked to write a short piece on Louis Kahn’s Korman House for the October issue of Casa Vogue to accompany photographs by the talented Chris Mottalini.

Un conto è progettare una casa che si presenti bellissima nelle foto del primo giorno. Tutt’altra faccenda è progettarne una che prima accoglie una famiglia, poi un’altra e, dopo una quarantina d’anni, appaia ancora stupenda. È il caso della Korman House a Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, disegnata dall’architetto Louis Kahn e realizzata fra il 1971 e il ’73 – il suo ultimo incarico prima della prematura scomparsa nel marzo 1974. I committenti erano Steven e Toby Korman, la cui attività di famiglia era, ed è ancora, l’imprenditoria immobiliare. La coppia aveva tre figli; volendo dare loro spazio per crescere pianificarono, insieme alla sorella di Steven, Lynne Honickman, e a diversi cugini, un complesso familiare su un terreno non edificato di oltre 28 ettari, nei sobborghi di Philadelphia. La vicina casa degli Honickman, anch’essa progettata da Kahn, non è mai stata realizzata, consentendo alla Korman House di guadagnare spazio in un paesaggio progettato da Harriet Pattison (91 anni, architetto del paesaggio, l’ultima compagna di Louis Kahn, nonché madre di Nathaniel).

Photo by Max Touhey of the first-floor gallery at the expanded Museum of Modern Art.

“PACE YOURSELF,” I tweeted the first time I saw the new MoMA. Two and a half hours after I arrived, I was exhausted … and I hadn’t even had time to visit the store. As the nice young woman from marketing moonlighting at the Information desk said, the new MoMA is now on the order of the Met or the Louvre. You’d be foolish to try to do it all in a day. You need to think about visiting differently.

Typically when a new museum opens, the architecture critics cover the building and the art critics cover the exhibits. That works for buildings with boundaries. But the new MoMA isn’t a static object or a solid, it’s a hydra, wending its way behind the permanent parade of silver and black curtain walls on West 53rd Street, snaking upward in three strands, west, north, and south, behind surfaces that are grandly and blandly fine.

“Grandly and blandly fine” has been my mental description of MoMA ever since Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 expansion created many of the circulation and hierarchy problems that the latest set of architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Gensler, were hired to fix, $450 million and 47,000 square feet ago. (The museum is now 165,000 square feet in total.) Taniguchi decided minimal detailing and maximal spaces were the way to add grandeur to the museum’s collection of buildings, taking his cue from the generosity of Philip Johnson’s 1953 sculpture garden. But his big gestures, especially the four-story white atrium, felt flat after their initial impact. Even if space is the ultimate luxury in Manhattan, that volume managed to feel cheap.

MoMA has doubled down on details and dun-colored materials, but the museum wasn’t so foolish as to ask its new architects for more grand spaces. Instead, they were asked to solve a traffic problem: how to get 2.8 million visitors per year through the galleries without choke points and lines, confusion and disappointment. Hence the hydra, which springs from a lobby that appears power-washed and forks into gallery after gallery of greatest hits and new surprises. The power of the new MoMA – the flex – comes from the art, not the architecture.

Courtesy HBO.

No amount of decor can cover the truth in Succession: It’s not the furniture, it’s the humiliation

In Season 2, Episode 4 of the HBO series Succession, someone fires a gun.

This is far from the first gunshot (in the previous episode, for example, the top managers at Waystar Royco, the fictional Murdoch-esque media-and-entertainment company, were flown to a castle in Hungary for a team-building retreat which involved hunting wild boar). But this gunshot, fired in the offices of ATN—the company’s Fox News-y cable network—sends members of the inner circle into a different sort of panic.

“I’m in the wrong panic room,” says the venal, hapless Minnesotan Tom Wambsgans (played by Matthew Macfadyen). Tom, you see, is an executive married to Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook), Titian-haired princess of Waystar Royco. No one, including Tom, thinks he is good enough for her, and here is physical proof: a white-walled breakroom with snacks and a laminate countertop that’s neither sealed nor secure. Tom recognizes that his wife and her father, company founder Logan Roy (Brian Cox), aren’t in his room. They are in a better one.

Panic room hierarchy serves as a neat shortcut into the Roy family’s architectural psychology. This is not a show that merits deep reading of throw pillow choices or kitchen island family dynamics. What matters most is: Who’s in the room?

Designer Cas Holman with Geemo, her first toy to market. Courtesy Netflix.

What if the future of early-childhood education didn’t involve an iPad? What if, on the playground, movable blocks and ladders replaced fixed plastic slides and tubes? What if teachers acted more like guides and were less beholden to worksheets? School would be more like the creative process (rather than the counting-the-minutes crucible that many students experience) and the tools would look quite different: wooden play pieces, ropes and pulleys, nuts and bolts. That’s where Cas Holman comes in. Holman is the founder of the toy company Heroes Will Rise, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, and one of six designers profiled in the second season of “Abstract: The Art of Design,” on Netflix. In the episode that features Holman, we get a glimpse of the educational future, as Chinese kindergartners, dressed for the rain in full-body yellow slickers, create a life-size version of a Hot Wheels track out of ladders and barrels, learning about coöperation, gravity, and momentum along the way.

Holman, who is forty-five, is best known as a member of the design team behind the Imagination Playground blocks: blue foam logs, bricks, arches, and chutes, some as big as a preschooler; they allow children to build their own playground and, in the process, practice teamwork. Since 2010, when the blocks were launched, in a park in lower Manhattan, they have spread to libraries, children’s museums, more parks, and schools in more than seventy countries. The blocks, which are bulky but lightweight, make it possible to set up play practically anywhere; the minute they hit the floor, the kids take over, creating their own world, with their own hands—not without some bickering. “The reason I design for children is I’m designing for people,” Holman said. “These are the people that are going to make the world suck or not suck. Good toys make good people.”

Jolie Crider Memorial Skatepark 2.0, designed by Finnish landscape architect and former professional skater Janne Saario. Photograph by Hadley Fruits.

Columbus, Ind., is known as a mecca of postwar modern architecture, with churches, libraries, and post offices designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Harry Weese and a host of other big names. The city’s latest destination is somewhat smaller: a skatepark, albeit one with an international design pedigree. Jolie Crider Memorial Skatepark 2.0, designed by Janne Saario, a Finnish landscape architect and former professional skater, opened in early September. The skatepark bridges the past and future of Columbus, with Mitchell Giurgola Architects’ 1972 Columbus East High School right across the street.

The podcast “99 Percent Invisible” got Mr. Saario the job: Jonathan Nesci, a designer who lives in Columbus and is the father of a skater, cold-emailed the architect after listening to “The Pool and the Stream,” a 2017 episode about the connection between curvaceous swimming pools and skatepark design featuring Mr. Saario. Mr. Nesci eventually gave Mr. Saario one of his mirror-polished side tables in return for a conceptual design. Hunger Skateparks, in Bloomington, Ind., signed on to build the $400,000, 14,000-square-foot project, with support from the city, the county’s Heritage Fund, the Columbus Park Foundation and local donors. The new concrete skatepark is far more durable than its predecessor, as well as more seamlessly integrated into the landscape, reflecting the same investment in advanced design as those public works of the 1950s and 1960s.

The site around 1960, from the book “Zevaco” by Michel Ragon and Henri Tastemain. Afriat/Frac Centre-Val de Loire Collection.

When Aziza Chaouni was a girl, she spent holidays with her grandmothers at Sidi Harazem, a thermal bath complex built next to an ancient magnesium-rich spring about seven miles east of Fez, Morocco.

One grandmother loved the new complex, designed by Jean-François Zevaco and completed in 1960, soon after Moroccan independence. “She was born and raised in Fez, in the old city, and she was very keen on alternative medicine,” said Ms. Chaouni, a professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto and principal of Aziza Chaouni Projects. “She was amazed by the new facilities. We would stay in the bungalows that were modeled after the medina — as a child it was like a maze.”

The other grandmother was nostalgic for the pre-modern Sidi Harazem. The springs, set in an arid mountain range, had drawn visitors since the time of the Romans, and Sultan Abu el-Hassan built a 14th-century shrine to Sidi Harazem, a Sufi theologian, on a nearby plateau. “They used to wake up at 5 a.m. and walk from Fez, then simply camp. Locals would offer space in their own homes,” Ms. Chaouni recalled. “For people who lived in Fez, it was their green lung.”

Victor Gruen’s first downtown project on Burdick Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan, circa 1970. Photo by Lance Ferraro.

Ah, the heady optimism of 1974! On the cover of The Pedestrian Revolution, by Simon Breines and William J. Dean, men in bell-bottoms and women in vests stroll between planters of lush blooms, dine under a purple umbrella, take a tram, always surrounded by blocky towers. “Streets Without Cars,” the subtitle, offers the promise of leisure, sunshine, and family time on some not-so-mean streets.

“Urban society’s growing frustration with the automobile, and the congestion it causes, is a major factor behind the Pedestrian Revolution,” Breines and Dean write. “Pedestrianism enhances our physical well-being both by reducing air and noise pollution and by encouraging, through the creation of urban strollways and urban bikeways, the greater use of footpower.”

Yes, you think. Too true, you nod. And then the publication date sinks in.

We’ve been here before, if here means trying to assert the primacy of the person—the pedestrian, the cyclist, the transit rider—in the matrix of city streets. We’ve been here before if here means realizing that, for the health of the planet, we need to make the pedestrian life easier than the windshield view.

Once upon a time in the 1960s and 1970s, urban leaders pushed cars out of downtown. Why is it so hard to do that now?

POLITICO Magazine asked dozens of big thinkers to tell them their boldest solutions to America’s problems, and this was my response…

Public space is inextricable from urban issues. But many politicians have become disconnected from the physical reality of the people they serve, which leads to a disconnect from their constituents.

I propose a movement to get all politicians—or at least mayors and other urban politicians—to spend at least one day a week working car-free. This wouldn’t just be an exercise in empathy for constituents who don’t have cars, or an opportunity for politicians to experience the public transportation system from which, via years of being driven from A to B to C, they may have become estranged. There are hundreds of data points that could drive policy that can best be understood while walking down a sidewalk, cycling down a bike lane or tapping on to a bus. Are sidewalks in good repair? Is there shade at the bus stops? Where does it flood during a rainstorm? Reducing car dependence is also key to any meaningful strategy to address the climate crisis: We need to give people good options to abandon their cars.