Artwork by Mike Perry.

In 1945, the year of his first collection for Herman Miller, George Nelson and Henry Wright published the seminal book Tomorrow’s House. “As soon as wartime restrictions end, the demand for housing will burst into a great building boom,” wrote the editors of LIFE, which printed a preview of the book. “This happened after the last war. But people did not know what they needed in a house. As a result they got homes which were outmoded before they were built.”

Nelson and Wright wrote with urgency: The window between the end of the war and the production of what would eventually balloon into 13 million new houses was short, and it was up to them to save America from its traditional self. Despite the title, their book was not a catalogue of technological advancement—when they write of climate control and solar heating, their suggestions include attic fans and concrete floors to store daytime warmth.

Tomorrow, to them, was social. Tomorrow, we would acknowledge that modern women work. Tomorrow, we would grant that kids need somewhere to play. Tomorrow, we would think about storage. Tomorrow, we would embrace how we use our homes today, rather than buying the ‘dream house’.

Photo by Simon Luethi/Ford Foundation.

When the Ford Foundation’s 12 stories of mahogany-colored granite, Cor-Ten steel, and transparent glass opened on 42nd Street in 1967, urban observers saw it as a gift.

Designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates with Dan Kiley as landscape architect, the building—comprising offices for the foundation’s several hundred employees, all wrapping a vertical indoor botanical garden—could have been two and a half times larger as of right.

The Ford Foundation didn’t have to open its garden atrium to the public, either. What was considered so benevolent five decades ago, however, doesn’t seem like gift enough in 2018. Good design, quality materials. Public-facing design, quality materials: these remain elements that we praise but, as critics of the time noted, they should be the minimum. For a philanthropic organization like the Ford Foundation, the challenge was to apply those 21st-century values to a monument of the 20th century.

Mr. Rogers visits the Pittsburgh Toy Lending Library, 1986.

On July 30, 1942, then–New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was uptown in Harlem, playing with toys.

“Harlem Gets First Toyery,” announced a Paramount newsreel heralding the opening of the neighborhood’s first toy-lending library, a storefront on West 135th Street stocked with 1,000 playthings and sponsored by a branch of the Domestic Relations Court.

Ida Cash, a city probation officer, had conceived of the “toyery” in the late 1920s upon “contrasting the barren homes she found with the happy lot of her own children.” Philanthropic New York women decided to support the project, likewise concerned that children were being arrested for stealing toys.

By the 1930s, the Heckscher Foundation for Children ran two toyeries where children could play with toys, check them out, and make crafts. Others followed suit. A consensus had formed that, as with playgrounds and book libraries, funds should be set aside for playing with toys. Monkey bars worked their bodies, reading worked their minds, but there was something else, something both physical and mental, that happened when they worked their fingers. Imagination. Socialization. Freedom.

Scholar’s Cloister, Menil Drawing Institute. Photo by Richard Barnes.

When Renzo Piano’s Menil Collection building opened in 1987 critics called it “just perfect.” Johnston Marklee’s Drawing Institute improves on perfection

Is it an insult to say my favorite part of the museum is the trees?

Not in the case of the Menil Collection campus in Houston. The opening of the institution’s latest building—the Menil Drawing Institute, on November 3—was also the occasion for replacing a diseased tree with a 25-year-old live oak, which arrived wrapped like a sculpture and necessitated closing a street.

This particular tree was on an open lawn opposite the Menil Collection building, the two-story Renzo Piano-designed pavilion that opened in 1987 and launched Piano’s career as architect of silvery rectangles with complicated roofs, as later seen in Basel and Chicago and Dallas and New York and Los Angeles. The first is the best—and was for many, including me, a revelation of how a museum could be.

Monstrum Fish, Chelsea Waterside Park, Manhattan. Photo by Max Giuliani, Hudson River Park Trust.

When Monstrum, a Danish playground-design firm, was asked to make playgrounds on the roof of the Lego House in Billund, Denmark, they knew one thing: they couldn’t be made of Lego. The exhibition building is full of Lego-based installations, games and, above all, playbricks, as visitors are encouraged to build whatever their imaginations conjure. The new playgrounds had to have the same sense of creativity without being made of movable parts. “Since the playgrounds are up in the air we decided to have everything mounted firmly into the ground, in order not to risk anything being thrown overboard,” says Jesper Vilstrup, general manager of the Lego House.

Instead Monstrum, which has built an international portfolio of playable fish, rockets, spires and birds, took the adventurous scenarios depicted on boxes of Lego as inspiration and decided on a theme: “How to get to Lego House”. Each area of the playground would be like a snapshot of a journey. There is a submarine caught in a fish net attacked by a sea monster, a hot-air balloon landing in a cornfield full of scarecrows, a helicopter made of wood and raised up high on thin steel poles that illustrate air currents whipping around it. The steel poles aren’t just for show: children can climb them to get to the helicopter, slide down to make their escape or ignore the vehicle above and simply swing between them. In each scenario, the child pilots his or her play, deciding how high to climb and how deep to descend into whatever adventure narrative they have devised. The playgrounds are stage sets, and the children are actors writing their own scripts.

A rendering of 80 Flatbush, which will stand just under 1,000 feet tall. Courtesy Alloy Development

At its current rate of growth, Brooklyn is about to be more populous than the entire city of Chicago.

Saying “we need more housing” is a given, but no one agrees on where, how high, and for whom. And New York has been later to that discussion than San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles: While the city is building housing, technically, it is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of 144,000 new Kings County residents since 2010.

All of this zooms into sharp focus on a 60,000-square-foot trapezoidal block straddling scenic Boerum Hill and high-traffic Flatbush Avenue. The proposed mixed-use project known as 80 Flatbush will include two high-rise towers, with offices below and 900 residences above. Twenty percent of its apartments will be affordable, and two existing historic brick buildings will be repurposed as a cultural facility and retail space. Two schools will be built, underwritten by the Educational Construction Fund (ECF), which creates schools on underutilized city sites without public funding.

The developers are seeking a change to the city’s zoning laws in order to build bigger and more dense, but have run into opposition from some Boerum Hill residents, who view the project as out of scale with their low-slung neighborhood. The City Council will decide its fate soon, perhaps by the end of this month.

Mt. Healthy Elementary School in Columbus, Ind. (Norman McGrath / H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture LLC)

An interview with Carolina A. Miranda in the Los Angeles Times. Turns out she went to an open plan school too, in Irvine, Calif.

When architecture critic Alexandra Lange first had her children — a son and daughter, now ages 11 and 7, respectively — she says that she found herself, like many parents of infants, contending with an avalanche of stuff: toys, dish ware, clothing, furnishings and assorted accoutrements.

“As a design critic, all this stuff was coming into my house and I had opinions about it,” she recalls. Like the Automoblox Minis that someone had gifted her son — toys that showed a good eye for form, but which failed crucial tests of day-to-day play. “By the 100th time I lost the wheels under my couch,” says Lange, “I decided that they didn’t work.”

That episode inspired an essay in Fast Company about toy design. Since then, the intersecting topics of kids and design is something she has revisited regularly in her dispatches for Curbed and the New Yorker. And it’s something she explores at length in her new book, “The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids,” published this summer by Bloomsbury.

As expected, the book contains chapters devoted to charting the history of important toys, such as wood blocks and Lego. But “Design of Childhood” casts a wider, more ambitious net, looking at the ways in which attention to children and their needs has helped shape design at large — including public space (playgrounds), architecture (schools and the home) and urbanism (safe street design).

As many families head back to school (at last), what should they keep from the summer, besides jars of shells? New York City schools start after Labor Day. My family, like many others, tries to make the most of summer by going on vacation during the last week of August. Our getaway of choice is Fire Island, where, for the past four years, we’ve rented the same house. It isn’t ours, of course, but by now there is comfort in returning to the same corduroy sofa, the same mismatched mugs, the same rusty bicycles.

Familiarity means that we can quickly adapt to a way of life that feels very different from our daily existence in Brooklyn. And it isn’t just the lack of deadlines. The kids go in and out on their own, wandering to a friend’s house or biking to the next town over, with no more than a word of departure or a confirming text on arrival. We meet up on the beach and pretend to read. If you need to go home to use the bathroom, you go—the house isn’t locked—and come back with a bag of chips. I am not texting, calendaring, accompanying at all times. I can sit. My phone stays in a Ziploc bag for hours. Suddenly, it’s dinnertime.

For a week, I catch a glimpse of the family life that previous generations are always telling us about: “My mother kicked us out of the house after breakfast and said, ‘Don’t come back until dinner!’ ” Or, “We went out to the woods behind our house after school and built forts.” Or, “As soon as we scraped together the change, we walked downtown and went to the movies.”