June 30, 2025 Ι Bloomberg CityLab The 12-story building at 300 West Adams Street is typical of the terra-cotta-clad office towers that rose in downtown Chicago during the 1920s. Heavily ornamented with Gothic Revival details and brass decorative elements, it’s across the street from the city’s tallest skyscraper, the freshly renovated Willis (née Sears) Tower, and… Continue reading Struggling Downtowns Are Looking to Lure New Crowds
Author: zachmortice
Hard Reckonings
May 2025 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine The facilities at Green Hill School Recreation and Wellness Center in Chehalis, Washington, were designed with the principles of bioilic and trauma-informed design, which included a recreation center with a pool, gymnasiums, a yoga studio, a teaching kitchen, and a multi-purpose event space. Seattle-based HBB Landscape Architecture designed the… Continue reading Hard Reckonings
Lakisha Woods Exits Role as AIA EVP/CEO
February 7, 2025 Ι Architectural Record This past weekend, Lakisha Woods quietly left her position as EVP/CEO of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), just three years after taking on the role. Woods announced her resignation in December at an in-person all staff meeting, moments before a champagne toast and annual holiday party. “There was an… Continue reading Lakisha Woods Exits Role as AIA EVP/CEO
We Will Tell Our Story brings decolonial critique to the Chicago architecture canon
March 21, 2025 Ι Architect’s Newspaper From the top of the Ferris Wheel at the 1893 Chicago World Columbian Exposition, Simon Pokagon, an Indigenous rights activist born in 1830, addressed the burgeoning city, and saw an apocalyptic tide of change. “How unlike the Chi-Kag-Ong of the red man!” he wrote in the New York Times… Continue reading We Will Tell Our Story brings decolonial critique to the Chicago architecture canon
At the National Public Housing Museum, an Embattled Idea Finds a Home
April 25, 2025 Ι Bloomberg CityLab The items on display at the new National Public Housing Museum in Chicago are almost defiant in their ordinariness. There’s a hammer once used by a resident of the city’s Stateway Gardens development; an iron skillet from a family living in Houston’s Cuney Homes; a hose that once watered… Continue reading At the National Public Housing Museum, an Embattled Idea Finds a Home
Scholastic Resignation
April 4, 2025 Ι Architect’s Newspaper The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is an international membership association that represents more than 200 schools of architecture and 7,000 faculty around the world. In February, as reported by AN, it canceled the Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) themed on Palestine… Continue reading Scholastic Resignation
In Chicago, a Former Steel Mill Looks to Make a Quantum Leap
April 8, 2025 Ι Bloomberg CityLab Life after steel on the South Side of Chicago can be surprisingly beautiful. On a peninsula in Lake Michigan carved out by shipping inlets sits Steelworkers Park, a serene space on the southeast edge of the city that once held the roaring furnaces of US Steel’s South Works. Shoreline… Continue reading In Chicago, a Former Steel Mill Looks to Make a Quantum Leap
Women Architects Struggled to Find a Home Within Modernism
March 8, 2025 Ι Metropolis Magazine The question at the heart of Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism (by Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy, Princeton University Press) is very simple: “What is Modernism?” Focusing on early women Modern architects with special attention on graduates of the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape… Continue reading Women Architects Struggled to Find a Home Within Modernism
Remembering the Landscape Architect Who Embraced the City
Bloomberg CityLab Ι March 1, 2025 In 1972, the New York Times described the landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg as one of the “New Left of playground designers” for his radical breaks with tradition. His playgrounds and landscapes emphasized abstract, elemental forms for play and exploration, inserted into gritty New York City public housing projects,… Continue reading Remembering the Landscape Architect Who Embraced the City
Perkins&Will revisits Crow Island School near Chicago to update and upgrade a groundbreaking modernist monument to creative pedagogy
Feb. 6, 2025 Ι Architect’s Newspaper Based on a child-centered and scaled view of primary school pedagogy that celebrates learning in landscape and artisanal craft, Crow Island School, in the North Shore Chicago suburb of Winnetka, is typically regarded as the first modernist school in the nation. Now, it is undergoing an exacting renovation and… Continue reading Perkins&Will revisits Crow Island School near Chicago to update and upgrade a groundbreaking modernist monument to creative pedagogy