Featured stories
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New York Needs to Rethink Time, Not Space, To Actually Reopen
Timed ticketing could allow for both access and social distancing.
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New York City’s two biggest design stories of 2019 are also design failures
Our national addiction to drama extends to million- and billion-dollar projects that will shape the waterfront for the next 50-plus years
Critical Eye
Critic Alexandra Lange's incisive, observant, curious, human- and street-friendly architecture column for Curbed.
Navigating the new MoMA
The expanded Museum of Modern Art is so big, you may need GPS, and you’ll definitely need a snack.
Who’s afraid of the pedestrian mall?
To make cities safer and denser, we need to make room for people, not cars. The specter of the 1970s is holding our foot traffic back.
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The Big Little Lie of the TV kitchen island
The women of the HBO series should lose their spectacular, high-maintenance houses.
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New York City is a mall
Experts claim retail is dead, but the "vertical centers" and "food halls" in America’s densest city just keep coming.
Why U.S. cities should stop whining and embrace winter
The cold is not the problem, it’s the way we are looking at it. Here’s how to make art of winter.
Critical Eye: A year in review
In 2018, Alexandra Lange tackled the horror of home tech, made a case for Late Modernism, and visited a subtle standout in Houston.
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Building your values
The Ford Foundation’s restoration of its landmark building makes a bold statement about what architecture owes the public today
A museum grows in Houston
When Renzo Piano’s Menil Collection building opened in 1987 critics called it "just perfect." Johnston Marklee’s Drawing Institute improves on perfection.
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Is America’s densest city ready to make room?
Our New York-based architecture critic says, "Yes, in my backyard"
We should use the electric scooter boom to rethink our streets—beyond traffic lanes
Let’s organize the city outside our front door with as much care as we do our homes.
Meet the Hunters, Vermont’s modernist-house pioneers
The Eameses weren’t the only postwar couple designing glassy houses, patenting simplified chairs, and rethinking modern living.
How not to cheat children: Let them build their own playgrounds
"A child must feel he has an effect on his environment. If they cannot create, they must destroy."
Concrete utopia
The Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition contextualizes the concrete architecture of the former Yugoslavia—but what does our love of brutalist buildings say about us?
Gateway to what?
St. Louis’s Gateway Arch is perfect. What lay at its feet was the problem.
Sky bridges and gardens aren’t real public space. Here’s why that matters
We shouldn’t abandon the cities we have for some amenities in the clouds.
Q&A: Alexandra Lange on ‘The Design of Childhood’
From wooden blocks to city blocks, Lange’s new book explains why child-focused design is actually for everyone.
Young adult architecture
Public libraries offer teenagers space where no one tells them to sit up straight or be quiet.
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Can LA repeat its 1984 Summer Olympics success?
The 1984 Olympics Games proved Los Angeles could do spectacle—on a shoestring budget. Can the city do it again in 2028?
The end of the architect profile
It’s time to stop perpetuating the myth of the lone genius.
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Inside Spyscape, NYC’s first spy museum
Playacting espionage in a total design environment.
What does a presidential building look like?
Barack Obama wants to create a new kind of presidential library. Why has that proven so contentious?
‘Black Mirror’ meets HGTV, and a new genre, home design horror, is born
How we get from coveting midcentury things to the Internet of Things.
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Why SOM’s modernist Union Carbide building is worth saving
Renovation is always a better use of resources than demolition and replacement
In a post-mall era, why are starchitects building more retail?
It’s not that bricks and mortar is out of fashion; bad customer experience is out of fashion.
Why postmodernism is the palate cleanser we need
How our love-to-hate-it relationship with postmodernism may be more important to design progress than we think.
The women designers who made Herman Miller furniture shine
Sizzling graphics, bright colors, and bold juxtapositions
Design within reach
The Cooper-Hewitt’s latest exhibition clarifies why accessible design is not a privilege, but a right.
2017 in architecture: The good, the bad, and the pink
Critics Alexandra Lange and Mark Lamster weigh in on a year in design.
Apple Park: The one that got away
An architecture critic reflects on the most-hyped building of 2017.
How teen-focused design can help reshape our cities
Sometimes it seems like there is nowhere for teens to be. Here’s what they are doing about it.
Judging a book by its cover
Why vintage design books are now so radical—and radically expensive.
Are we having fun yet?
The Museum of Ice Cream is popular, colorful, and sugary, but are visitors playing—or playing themselves?
Eavesdropping on the design icons who made Washington’s Metro
Harry Weese designed DC’s famously Brutalist metro system—with a little constructive criticism from Gordon Bunshaft, Aline Saarinen, and Hideo Sasaki.
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Have you hugged a geode today?
The American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Minerals and Gems closes next week for a gut renovation. Curbed architecture critic Alexandra Lange sheds a tear for its 1970s decor.
The A-frame effect
The A-frame, both doll- and human-sized, is back, and for all the same reasons that made it a phenomenon in the first place.
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Cornell Tech's new NYC campus puts sustainable architecture into practice
Alexandra Lange visits the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, a $2 billion investment bringing high-profile architects—and a bevy of public space—to a neighborhood apart.
How should we live (at college)?
Yale University’s longstanding dependence on neo-gothic architecture has underestimated its students ability to adapt.
Gunnar Birkerts, postwar modernist, dies at 92
The Latvian-American architect’s legacy is more relevant than ever.
OMA's revamp plan for Buffalo museum chases the contemporary to detriment of past
The expansion will include an underground parking garage, renovations of its existing buildings, and new education facilities and offices.