In Palaver, Bryan Washington’s new novel, a mother estranged from her son surprises him by showing up at his apartment in Tokyo. They haven’t seen each other for a decade. The son, escaping a difficult family situation in Houston, has found work as an English tutor. His search for a new life parallels the life arc of his mother, who grew up in Jamaica before landing in Houston by way of Toronto. The pair slowly reconnect, as chronicled through mumblecore scenes and Sebaldian interludes of Washington’s own photos of Tokyo. At one point, the mother finally asks, “Haven’t you been gone long enough?” “I live here now. This is home,” the son replies.
Washington’s novel dwells on the difficulties of domestic intimacy. Our homes, and our cities, are not always safe. In early 2026, we’ve seen this happen in Minnesota where ICE operatives have been on patrol and attacking citizens. On January 7, an agent shot and killed Renée Good, and on January 24, a Border Patrol officer shot and killed Alex Pretti. (Strangely, both were 37, the same age I am now, when their lives were ended.) Civic life in Minneapolis has been disrupted: Good’s neighbors banded together to protect themselves, kids were kept home from school out of fear, and protesters and businesses went on strike to peacefully make their opposition known. “The occupation of Minnesota by ICE cannot stand,” the editorial board of the Minnesota Star Tribune declared on January 15. A later headline on January 24 was more direct: “An ICE pause is the only path to peace.” This violence, and much else, shakes the foundation of our country as we enter its semiquincentennial year.
Across this issue, we take an in-depth look at housing and homes through a variety of stories, from our features that survey housing across the United States to news of policy under New York’s Mayor Mamdani to an interview with Cobalt Office, a Houston-based studio that focuses on multiunit buildings and a review of a forthcoming book from Jack Balderrama Morley, a former AN managing editor, about the architecture of reality TV. (This edition’s icy colorway is also a seasonally appropriate riff on the Pantone Color of the Year 2026, Cloud Dancer.) Plus: Our Focus section on home construction delivers illuminating case studies and useful products.
And don’t miss our annual Twenty to Watch list, which rounds up rising residential architecture design talent in New York. See the designers reshaping the future of design on, and mark your calendar to join us at the A&D Building on the night of Thursday, March 5, to party with these architects.
At the end of 2025, we lost two giants of American architecture, Robert A. M. Stern and Frank Gehry. While Stern had a deep influence on the pedagogy and practice of architecture in the U.S., it’s fair to say that he wasn’t as radical or popular as Gehry. Many architects prize Gehry’s early work, which crumpled the stick-frame into funky forms in an approach he called “cheapskate architecture.” This was before projects like the Guggenheim in Bilbao catapulted him into the cultural spotlight in the 1990s.
With the publication of Five Buildings by Frank Gehry, Swedish architect and photographer Johan Dehlin shares his 2015 documentation of a quintet of projects finished between 1979 and 1984. In the Spiller House, completed in 1980 and seen above, a stair runs upward into the light with exposed framing that creates layers of pattern. (Meanwhile, a duct takes a left turn in the background.) Gehry, an immigrant from Canada, somehow figured out how to wrangle America’s preferred building system into something strange and beautiful. As Cameron Winters pleads in Geese’s heartwrenching “Au Pays du Cocaine,” “You can be free and still come home.”
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