In 1948, the historian of modern architecture Siegfried Giedion explained in the preface to his book Mechanization in Power the raison d'être of his encyclopedic work on American mechanization, the examination of which, he wrote, was dictated by the importance of paying attention to "[...] humble things, objects to which we do not generally attach great importance, or at least to which we do not attribute historical value."2 In it, he justifies the need to pay attention to almost nothing, to details and to apparently negligible elements because "a teaspoon reflects the sun well!" In this light, the innocuous and the obscure find in the apparently insignificant, morbid and terribly banal news item, its little spoon capable of holding attention. A popular counterpoint that is automatically disqualified from history, it nevertheless reveals individual ingenuity that goes beyond the criteria of morality, and as such can claim to figure prominently in it. Since the uchronia News from Nowhere (1890) in which the designer William Morris devoted a chapter to crime, designers have appropriated fiction, less often crime, favoring newspapers to disseminate it, in order to carry far the political and social criticism that their discipline originally engaged. Renewed attempts to establish the elements of fiction as a model of reality have demonstrated the power of reality to resist, and to prove fascinating. Inspired by the virtuous stakes of the modern era of their respective disciplines, architecture and design critics have refused to show any interest in a criminal subject such as the news item, despite the fact that the famous 1 This title refers to the title Mord ist Ihr Hobby from the German version of the detective series Arabesque, whose character is said to have been inspired by Frances Glessner Lee, and to that of the exhibition dedicated to her: "Murder is her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death" at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2018.