| 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. Special thanks to Feargus O’Sullivan for watching the shop while I was away. Don’t miss his feature on Trump aesthetics and Rococo. This week Eduardo Souto De Moura received the Praemium Imperiale, Japan’s highest architecture award. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday.  The Hall of Justice, haven for metahumans and Cincinnatians. Courtesy of DC Comics The Justice League has made its headquarters in many secret lairs: a fictional New England mountain just off the coast of Rhode Island, for example, and a satellite Watch Tower orbiting high above Earth. Superman has many homes, too: the doomed world of Krypton where he was born, the Kansas town of Smallville where he was raised, and the doorman building in midtown Metropolis where he pays his rent. Of all the sites in all the stories of the Man of Steel and his super friends, though, none is as quite as essential as Cincinnati. That’s right, Cincy. Not Titans Tower, not the Fortress of Solitude, not the Bat Cave — Cincinnati, Queen City, home of glorious Reds baseball and dubious Skyline chili. For more than 50 years, Cincinnati’s Union Terminal has served as the model for the Hall of Justice, a base for the best and brightest in DC Comics.  The Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal in 2020. Photographer: Jason Whitman/NurPhoto via Getty Images In the new Superman film, director James Gunn shot scenes set at the Hall of Justice at the real-life train station, an Art Deco masterpiece designed by Paul Cret (with Roland Wank of the firm Fellheimer and Wagner) in 1933, when both passenger train travel and the city of Cincinnati were at the height of their powers. After a lengthy historic renovation completed in 2018, the spruced-up terminal currently anchors a complex of cultural attractions called the Cincinnati Museum Center. (You can still catch a train there, too.) The Hall of Justice cameo is one of the many delightful moments in Gunn’s Superman, a reboot that traces the hero’s roots to the more-colorful, less-brooding characters of comic books’ Silver Age. In the movie, the Hall is HQ for Guy Gardner, Mister Terrific and Hawkgirl, the so-called Justice Gang who help Supes take on Lex Luthor. These characters give the movie color; Union Terminal gives it texture. As you’ve likely heard from any person who has spent any length of time living in Ohio, Superman filmed in both Cincinnati and Cleveland — the hometown of Superman comic-strip creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Cleveland’s Leader Building serves as the home of The Daily Planet newspaper. Kal-El smooches Lois Lane in the Cleveland Arcade. And Superman and his super friends battle it out with a nasty kaiju in Cleveland’s Public Square.  Animators have adapted the Hall of Justice to different eras of the Justice League. Courtesy of DC Comics But it’s the Hall of Justice spot that’s so special — and hella meta. The Hall of Justice made its first appearance in the Super Friends cartoon show in 1973. Just a few years prior, the animation studio Hanna-Barbera was acquired by the Cincinnati-based Taft Broadcasting. Cincinnati-based toymaker Kenner Products — the company was named after a street adjacent to Union Terminal — even built a Hall of Friends playset based on the station. When it was built, Union Terminal was a transit capitol for the Midwest. The station replaced five local train depots, serving as the single nexus for 13 lines from 7 railroads. Expansive glass mosaic tile murals by Winold Reiss pay tribute to both local history and industrial labor; the station’s magnificent Seth Thomas clock is a timepiece for the entire city. But Union Terminal arrived at a time when personal automobiles were overtaking intercity passenger rail. The quarter-sphere design of the station looks like a cathedral radio, another technology that was enjoying the last days of its golden age. The Art Deco station is a testament to the futurist’s faith in the machine age — a faith that proved to be misplaced. The city spent decades trying to determine how to preserve an essential building that would never fulfill its promise. Animators came up with the answer: Give it to the Justice League. Hanna-Barbera animator Al Gmuer was the first artist to base the Hall of Justice on the station, forever putting his mark on DC Comics. But he wasn’t happy about it. “In the long run, I hated that building,” Gmuer once told The Cincinnati Enquirer. “The way it’s designed, it was not easy to draw. I had nightmares about that damn building.” Design stories we’re writing |  The Federal Reserve building in Washington, DC, is undergoing a nearly $2.5 billion renovation. Photographer: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images North America Critics of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell have put forward an unlikely argument for removing him from his post before his term is up: the $2.5 billion renovation of the Fed’s headquarters. Allies of President Donald Trump, who has so far refrained from firing Powell, say that the cost overruns for restoring the Fed’s 1930s office buildings are the result of waste and fraud. But the job is challenging: Much of the work to expand the Fed’s DC campus involves excavating the ground beneath its historic 1937 building while stabilizing it in place. The job is so hard, in fact, that the contractors won an award for “excellence in the face of adversity” from a Washington building trades association. It’s a Paul Cret double feature: The architect of Cincinnati’s Art Deco train station also designed the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, a refined example of stripped-down classicism. I write about how the Fed building renovation came to cost $2.5 billion and why it’s so hard to build in the (literal) swamp of Washington. Design stories we’re reading | Read this great Lee Bey feature on a new affordable apartment building in Chicago designed by Canopy with Native American renters in mind. (Chicago Sun-Times) Populous is designing a new ribbon-looking soccer stadium for Thessaloniki in Greece. Come to think of it, all new stadiums are kind of ribbon-looking. (Domus) Oliver Wainwright writes up a new guide to the monumental architecture of war-torn Kharkiv. (The Guardian) Bill Dilworth, longtime steward of New York’s Earth Room, has died. (The New York Times) | 
