As the tenth anniversary of September 11 approaches, our host John Hockenberry decided to focus his summer reading on novels about 9/11. This week's pick touches upon how we memorialize a tragedy, which can be extremely political.

With so much destroyed in Tuesday’s earthquake, much will need to be rebuilt. The head of Architecture for Humanity looks at the challenges ahead for Port-au-Prince.

[Trailer for 'The Greening of Southie']

This morning we take a look at one way to reduce our impact on the environment ... green building. Commercial buildings use 36 percent of our electricity and produce 25 percent of our green house gases; residential buildings contribute a large share, too. So architecture is an area with a lot of potential for environmental improvement.

We talk with Curt Ellis, one of the filmmakers behind "The Greening of Southie," who spent nearly a year documenting the construction of Boston’s first L.E.E.D.–certified residential building, the Macallen Building. We're also joined by Yvan LaCroix, construction foreman on the Macallen Building.

Being in the hospital is bad enough. Then to add insult to whatever injury put you in the hospital, sometimes, you get stuck with a stranger as a roommate. Now a growing body of evidence shows that being alone in a single room helps patients get better, faster. This may seem like a no-brainer, yet few private rooms exist in the standard hospital. That could change due to the new field of “evidence-based hospital design”. Here to explain is Carol Ann Campbell, a medical writer whose story on this movement in health care appears today in the New York Times.

For more, read Carol Ann Campbell's article, Health Outcomes Driving New Hospital Design, in the New York Times.

This weekend, 1,100 auto-dealership owners across the country took in the sobering news that their contracts with GM will disappear in the auto maker's reorganization. A huge blow to the dealers who will be losing their livelihoods, the closings also raise the question of what to do with all the shuttered car dealerships. Most cities have at least one strip of town dedicated to car-dealer row. So what will happen when the dealers close up shop? For a few ideas we turn to Ellen Durham-Jones, Director of the Architecture Program at Georgia Tech and co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.

It may not be that easy to find a mall to go hang out and shop anymore. General Growth Properties, one of the biggest mall operators in the country, filed for bankruptcy yesterday. And we are seeing more and more malls die out. In fact as our next guest wrote in The New York Times earlier this month, no new malls have been built in the U.S. since 2006. So what is happening to the mall? And what should happen to the near empty malls now littering the American landscape? To help answer that question, The Takeaway is joined by Ellen Dunham-Jones, Director of the Architecture Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.

Read the New York Times article, 101 Uses for a Deserted Mall, including a contribution from our guest Ellen Dunham-Jones.

How I Met Your Mother's Robin Sparkles knows how to love a mall: