| We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to present an adapted version of the latest issue of CityLab Design Edition, Bloomberg's new weekly design digest from staff writer and editor Kriston Capps. If you want to read more like this, be sure to sign up for the newsletter here. The Barbara C. Jordan Post Office in Houston is a monumental example of suburban modernism. The core of this 550,000-square-foot complex is an elegant, classically proportioned mid-rise office tower, designed in 1961. The architects also designed a state-of-the-art processing and distribution center on the site. While the Post Office is adjacent to downtown, it's hemmed in by the Buffalo Bayou and highway spaghetti, making it essentially suburban. Complexes like the Post Office are stagnating. Nobody needs remote office parks today, to say nothing of a disused mail-sorting facility. Fixing a problem as big as Houston's Post Office means thinking big. OMA, the firm tasked with saving the project, aimed to bring the city into the complex. The firm is nothing if not audacious, as Alexandra Lange writes. After a major overhaul, POST — a food hall, gathering space and coworking haven — opened in the former mail distribution center in 2021. Lange flew to Houston to take a look at how OMA partner Jason Long tackled such a challenging project. And she looks at other similarly sized projects, including Gorlin Architects' work in Holmden, New Jersey, to return the former Bell Labs research and development facility to productive use.  Inside the mail distribution center, pictured before its transformation. Courtesy of OMA  One of three standout staircases inside POST. Photo by Leonid Furmansky Redefining the suburban corporate modernism that landscape architecture professor Louise Mozingo lovingly refers to as "pastoral capitalism" represents a major frontier for adaptive reuse. Turning warehouses into condos turns out to be relatively easy. The administrative tower in Houston's post office complex will likely be turned into a hotel. But another developer might have just as soon knocked the whole complex down. Modernism's heritage in the suburbs is at risk if these aging projects are not reused but demolished instead. And it is heritage. Countless shopping centers, mid-rises, banks and office parks that dot greater and lesser metros across the US can trace their genes back to modernist designers such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Suburban modernism takes many forms. Architecture firms finished off the year with another chilly month of declining billings, according to survey data collected by the American Institute of Architects. To compile its billings index, the organization polled hundreds of firms to find out if their billings went up or down over the last month. Architects who participated in the survey in December reported an eighth straight month of decline. But there's reason to be optimistic. Most surveyed firms also reported that they signed more contracts in December than in November. Inquiries were down in October, way up in November, and still positive in December. Those are signals that the design industry could be turning the page on a rough chapter. Looking across the industry, no specific type of firm appears to be doing worse than any other. Apartment-building designers, improving on several months of steep decline, were right in line with designers for commercial and institutional projects in December. Regionally, the report from firms is mixed. Fewer architects in the West and Northeast reported a dip in December than in November, which is a positive development. Firms in the Midwest actually reported an increase in billings in December — so the turnaround has already arrived in parts of the US. But architects in the South reported their worst month of billings in more than a year. Looking forward, bad news for designers means bad news for the greater building industry, since architecture billings are a lagging indicator for construction jobs. Builders may be in for a slow summer. Wider sidewalks, new bike lanes and more public squares are coming to the City of London, one of the busiest sectors in the UK. Conrad Quilty-Harper reports on efforts to reorient the City around pedestrians, a project that will make the financial district unrecognizable to a visitor from even the recent past. Projects by Gensler and LDA Design are part of a radical vision by the City of London Corporation to dramatically reduce automobile traffic to the area — a push that is not without its critics.  Joe Moore Back in 1967, the people of Morristown, Tennessee, bet big on a project called the Skymart: a network of elevated sidewalks through downtown. Today, those skywalks are still standing, and while they never quite delivered the utopia that Tennessee architect Hubert Bebb promised, they represent an alternative to the car-centric planning that predominated in most cities instead. David Zipper writes a letter from Morristown on the lessons of aerial urbanism. - One of the former designers behind +POOL is having second thoughts about the floating swimming pool proposal, Anjulie Rao writes. (Dwell)
- The Des Moines Art Center can't afford to repair a significant installation by land artist Mary Miss, Julia Halperin writes. (The New York Times)
- Washington state is weighing a bill to ban anti-homeless "hostile architecture." (KIRO7)
- Architecture firms Manica and TVS will design a new stadium for the Tennessee Titans. (Nashville Business Journal)
- Carla Bonilla Huaroc writes about how some architecture firms are restructuring their org charts. (ArchDaily)
- Jori Finkel writes about how New York's famed 1931 prefab Aluminaire House found a new home in Southern California. (The New York Times)
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