| 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 Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, announced that Weiss/Manfredi/Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism will design a $160–170 million museum expansion. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday.  The National Public Housing Museum opened to visitors in Chicago this month. Photographer: Barry Brecheisen/Getty Images North America The fate of housing assistance in the US hangs on the edge of a knife. Americans who rely on federal rent aid as well as advocates who support these programs are watching budget negotiations in Congress closely. Rising costs and increased burden mean that to simply maintain current levels of federal assistance, the budget for programs such as Section 8 housing vouchers would have to be increased substantially. Instead a net loss of tens of thousands of vouchers seems likely. Officials in the Trump administration are even considering cutting vouchers altogether, as the New York Times’ Tony Romm reports. Trump’s budget could instead replace vouchers with more limited housing block grants provided to the states. The budget discussions come amid efforts to claw back federal housing grants and slash headcount at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  A reconstruction of the apartment of the Turovitz family, who lived in Chicago’s Addams Homes in the 1940s. Photographer: Barry Brecheisen/Getty Images North America Looming threats to housing aid make the National Public Housing Museum all the more important. Chicago’s newest museum traces the history of public housing in the US and tells the stories of the families who lived in those apartments. The museum itself is an artifact, occupying a 1938 building that is the last part standing of the Jane Addams Homes project, which once housed 1,000 families. Importantly, as Zach Mortice writes, the NPHM dispels myths about America’s public housing experiment and why it failed. In the wake of that failed public housing experiment, lawmakers came up with vouchers as a bipartisan solution that didn’t require the government to be landlords. Vouchers were always a compromise: Paying the aid directly to landlords satisfied concerns on the right about waste and fraud, while vouchers allowed for liberal regulations about housing safety and quality. Inside the federal government, the thinking about vouchers had started to shift. Less than a year ago, Vox reporter Rachel Cohen wrote about an experiment at HUD to replace vouchers with cash. Now the debate has swung dramatically again, with Trump officials potentially putting the voucher system on the chopping block altogether. With housing support at risk, it’s worth looking back at the history of social housing. Mortice writes about what the nation lost when it backed out of building public housing and what it could gain again. Design stories we’re writing |  A new monument at Bryn Mawr takes the form of a landscaped plaza. Photographer: Steve Weinik Bryn Mawr, the suburban Philadelphia women’s liberal arts college, unveiled a new monument this week. “Don’t Forget to Remember (Me)” is a plaza designed by DC artist Nekisha Durrett. The landscape for the college’s Cloisters references the history of a college president who held racist views as well as the story of the college’s first Black graduate. I talked to Durrett about how these intertwined stories took shape as a braided-knot footpath at Bryn Mawr and how her work reflects changing narratives in public art. Design stories we’re reading | Must-read from Carolina A. Miranda on President Donald Trump’s rococo reno for the Oval Office. (The Washington Post) Cindy Hirschfeld investigates the claims by the Populus hotel in downtown Denver, designed by Studio Gang, to be “carbon positive.” (The New York Times) I wish I could take my critters to this Buenos Aires veterinary clinic, designed by Adamo Faiden and reviewed by Magdalena Tagliabue. (Architectural Review) Chicago is finally getting a park to honor Jean-Baptiste Point DuSable, the city’s first non-Native permanent resident, Lee Bay writes. (Chicago Sun-Times) Nolan Hicks writes about the Trump administration’s planning for New York’s Penn Station. (Streetsblog) Philip Kennicott’s also got a dispatch from the National Public Housing Museum. (The Washington Post) | 
