| Hello and welcome to Bloomberg’s weekly design digest. I’m Kriston Capps, staff writer for Bloomberg CityLab and your guide to the world of architecture and the people who build things. This week a Bloomberg CityLab series by Alexandra Lange won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Woo! Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday.  A courtyard made for kids at Brunson Terrace, an affordable development in Santa Monica designed by Brooks + Scarpa. Courtesy: Brooks + Scarpa Raise a glass to Bloomberg CityLab contributor Alexandra Lange, who took top honors this week! Her seven-part series for CityLab looks at how families experience public space. Each story dives into an example of architecture or landscape design that puts children, teenagers or caregivers at the center. Check out the whole Pulitzer Prize–winning series here. Lange had written for CityLab for years, but around the time she published her 2022 book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, she started writing for us regularly. CityLab published an excerpt from that book — about the golden age of walking the shopping mall — plus a few other mall-oriented stories, including a post-pandemic Santa Claus revival and a Toronto megaproject that looks a lot like a mall. Editing those articles made me deeply admire Lange’s work for its balance of reporting, analysis and historical insight. And who doesn’t love to read about malls? The reception and rollout for Meet Me by the Fountain also made me think about her earlier book, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids — a project that was ahead of its time.  A technical diagram for the mega-swing at Anna C. Verna Playground in Philadelphia. Courtesy of Berliner Seilfabrik Play Equipment Corporation That book changed the way I see things. Design of Childhood touches on a controversy set off by the historian Philippe Ariès, who wrote in 1960, “In medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist.” I knew this debate from art history, specifically the Western evolution of the child from the fun-sized-adult homunculus that appeared in medieval depictions of Mary’s annunciation to the realism of the Dutch Golden Age. Lange writes about the social construction of children, as it happened, over decades, in the different spheres of home, school, play and city. The issues she raises, of course, are far from academic. After reading Design of Childhood, I looked at both public space and writing about architecture in a new light. One thing that makes Lange’s work stand out is that she isn’t talking to or writing about the usual suspects. She can talk iconic buildings and novel towers as well as anyone, but in her work on public space, she is often writing up architects who are rethinking space from whole cloth. That’s rarely the big-name firms with a dozen partners. She writes more about women in design, period, than anybody.  Nature is part of the therapy program at the Ohana Center for Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health in Monterey, California, designed by NBBJ. Photographer: Ty Cole Any new idea needs reinforcement in order to take hold. So we developed a series focusing on designs that work for families through a broad array of stories. The goal was to go really wide with it: Instead of a linear history, this series shows how the theme plays out across parks, museums, housing and health care. Poynter’s Nicole Slaughter Graham talked to Lange as well as CityLab editor Nicole Flatow to find out about the award and the site. Graham does a good job of describing Lange’s relationship with CityLab and what this award means for its editors, so check out her story. And please consider the entire award-winning series for some rewarding Mother’s Day reads.  A skateboarder hits an ollie off of one of the biofiltration islands for natural onsite treatment of stormwater at the Ed Benedict Skate Plaza in Portland, Oregon. Photographer: Tojo Andrianarivo/Bloomberg | 
