Architecture and Design: 2013 Year In Review

We recap 2013's top headlines related to design and architecture. The year's top-of-mind issues—privacy rights, government's reach, the increasing income gap, economic vitality, and gender politics, among others—were tied into design current events more than ever before. In case you missed them the first time around, these stories related to preservation, urban planning, and technology, stuck with us. Lastly, we also say goodbye to five pioneering figures in architecture, design, photography, and criticism. Slideshow

A Bad Year for Brutalism

On the preservation front, the fight to save Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Women's Hospital came to an end. Despite calls from noted architects and critics to reconsider demolition, wrecking balls took to the concrete structure in October. “Great late-Modernist buildings, innovative and ruggedly beautiful, deserve respect and, increasingly, careful custody. Prentice is a good example,” Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times argued. While Brutalist buildings garner their fair share of derision (consider the aptly named Tumblr Architecture of Doom for instance) there's no denying the movement's importance in 20th-century architecture. In 75 years when we're looking back at the lost moments of modernism, will we have a Penn Station moment?