| 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 the National Gallery in London announced a design competition to build a new museum wing. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday.  Eliot Noyes’s Brutalist design for Southside Elementary School is one of the more polarizing examples of midcentury architecture in Columbus, Indiana. Photographer: Iwan Baan The start of the school year hits different in Columbus, Indiana. Students who attend Southside Elementary School file into a Brutalist bunker for classes. At Lillian C. Schmitt Elementary, the classrooms are shaped like pitched-roof prairie homes, with huge glass windows. And when the bell rings at L. Frances Smith Elementary School, kids make their way through a series of brightly colored tubes. Columbus, a town of 50,000, boasts some of the most daring school buildings of any city around. Every two years, right around the time that school picks up again, the town puts on a festival to celebrate its status as the modern architecture capital of the Midwest.  Harry Weese’s design for Lillian C. Schmitt Elementary served as a model for future schools in Columbus, Indiana. Hadley Fruits for Landmark Columbus Foundation For fans of midcentury modern architecture, Columbus and its biennial Exhibit Columbus program are a site of pilgrimage. Since its launch in 2016, the festival has invited design studios to respond to public buildings in town by the likes of I.M. Pei, Harry Weese, Susana Torre and more. On my first visit, in 2019, I toured a corn maze planted by MASS Design Group next to a middle school designed by Ralph Johnson of Perkins&Will. On every visit since, I’ve felt jealous of kids that grow up in Columbus. I’m also from a small town (in West Texas) and drew zero inspiration from the school buildings where I served my time. Children who go to school in Columbus get an early education in architecture. As Zach Mortice reports, they learn how buildings embed social values.  The outdoor courtyard framed by tunnels in John M. Johansen’s L. Frances Smith Elementary School will be enclosed in order to build a library and media center. Photographer: Hadley Fruits for Landmark Columbus Foundation School buildings such as John M. Johansen’s L. Frances Smith Elementary School are now more than 50 years old. The experiments in pedagogy that make them so unique and appealing also present substantial challenges in terms of upkeep. But Columbus is up to the challenge: The $306 million education package includes funds for renovating all of its school facilities, as well as $60 million for a new school, designed by Höweler + Yoon. Mortice reports on the individual treatments awaiting schools designed by the likes of Edward Larrabee Barnes, Gunnar Birkerts and Harry Weese, and he talks with Eric Höweler about the new school underway. Mortice also looks at a temporary Exhibit Columbus project by design educators at the University of Virginia that cuts against the notion of authority embedded in school buildings. Perhaps most importantly, Mortice explores an education system defined by possibility — not by cuts. Design stories we’re writing |  Volunteers with the nonprofit organization All Hands and Hearts vacuum and wipe down items from a home in Altadena, California, that survived the Eaton Fire but incurred smoke damage. Photographer: Alex Welsh/Bloomberg More than 11,500 homes burned in the wildfires that raged across Los Angeles in January. Thousands more were damaged by smoke, in ways that can be a lot harder to assess. In the wake of the fires, researchers, consultants and specialists are working to help homeowners determine whether their homes are safe. Thanks to the changing nature of urban wildfires, state and local guidelines for testing for smoke damage are falling short. But the stakes are high: In addition to toxins such as barium and zinc, testers are finding heavy metals that aren’t usually tested for after wildfires, such as beryllium, which can lead to disease even in small amounts. Emma Court reports on how the rise of so-called wildland-urban interface fires and the smoke they bring are changing the science and systems associated with recovering damaged properties. Design stories we’re reading | Christopher Hawthorne ranks the architecture of Ground Zero. You’ll never guess where One World Trade lands! (Punch List) Stefan Novakovic runs down the 2025 winners of the Aga Khan Award, sampling new projects in Iran, China, Palestine and beyond. (Azure) Lee Bey imagines a future for the shuttered Genesis Convention Center, a key project by Black architect Wendall Campbell in Gary, Indiana. (Chicago Sun-Times) A floating plaza by Höweler + Yoon and Carlo Ratti Associati that debuted at the Venice Architecture Biennale will make its next stop in Brazil. (Architectural Record) Michael J. Lewis finds the rare “small, well-built thing” in Sparano + Mooney’s design for the Wanlass Center for Art Education and Research, a compact art museum addition at Utah State University. (Wall Street Journal) | 
