Doggerel Ι April 21, 2017 Walk into the cavernous atrium of the National Building Museum a few blocks north of DC’s National Mall, and you’ll find a piece of wood whose scale rivals the 75-foot-tall, 8-foot-diameter masonry columns it sits next to. This 64-foot-tall plank, which the curators of the current exhibit Timber City have dubbed… Continue reading Making the case for wooden buildings
Author: zachmortice
How One Design Plan Could Relieve Food-Security Problems and Revive Post Offices
Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) is the epicenter of the nation’s largest semipermanent homeless population, and—predictably—a startlingly high rate of food insecurity. The neighborhood is also home to many restaurants and businesses that haul away tons of food waste. According to San Bernardino County Sun, L.A. County generates 4,000 to 6,000 tons of food waste every day (most… Continue reading How One Design Plan Could Relieve Food-Security Problems and Revive Post Offices
Weaponizing Architecture
Aug. 14, 2008 Ι AIArchitect Blog [This was a blog post, no longer online, I wrote for AIArchitect’s blog back in 2008. It was for a theme issue on fantasy and speculative architecture. But today I learned there’s a company out there, aided and abetted by the Trump Administration, that wants to make it real;… Continue reading Weaponizing Architecture
A Lot You Got to Holler EP 13: Designing Urban Policy with Katherine Darnstadt
EP 13: Designing Urban Policy with Katherine Darnstadt Katherine Darnstadt’s architecture firm Latent Design creates objects and urban systems, but it’s biggest victories have come from pulling the upstream policy levers that set the context for what architecture can achieve. In her chat with Ben and Zach, Katherine comes out in favor of “extreme vetting” for architects,… Continue reading A Lot You Got to Holler EP 13: Designing Urban Policy with Katherine Darnstadt
A Lot You Got to Holler EP 12: Who was Chicago’s Edgar Miller?
EP 12: Who was Chicago’s Edgar Miller? Edgar Miller is perhaps the most overlooked artist in the Chicago canon. Art was everywhere and everything to Miller, who used the city as his canvas through painting, woodworking, stained glass, sculpture, printmaking, iron working, industrial design and whatever materials fell his way. His expressionist, bespoke approach to design,… Continue reading A Lot You Got to Holler EP 12: Who was Chicago’s Edgar Miller?
An Affordable Housing Development Ascends From Ashes to Build Community
Redshift Ι March 13, 2017 For Victor Body-Lawson of architect-and-planning firm Body Lawson Associates (BLA), designing and building the Hunts Point Peninsula is less like designing a building and more like building a village. “We think of it as building a community,” Body-Lawson says. The new affordable housing development—located in the South Bronx, New York City—seeks to do… Continue reading An Affordable Housing Development Ascends From Ashes to Build Community
Haresh Lalvani on Biomimicry and Architecture That Designs Itself
Redshift Ι Jan. 17, 2017 It’s the holy grail for any biomimicry design futurist: buildings and structures that use generative geometry to assemble and repair themselves, grow, and evolve all on their own. Buildings that grow like trees, assembling their matter through something like genomic instructions encoded in the material itself. To get there, architecture alone… Continue reading Haresh Lalvani on Biomimicry and Architecture That Designs Itself
Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art Renovation Will Cater to a Wider Public
Architectural Record Ι March 1, 2017 A renovation of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) is intended to reintroduce the museum to a wider public, just when the project’s designers, the Los Angeles firm of Johnston Marklee, will be reintroducing themselves as artistic curators of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, set to open a few months after… Continue reading Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art Renovation Will Cater to a Wider Public
Underneath, Overlooked
Landscape Architecture Magazine Ι February 2017 In 2002, the Design Trust for Public Space published Reclaiming the High Line, a critical voice of support that helped jump-start the growing momentum to preserve that rusting hulk of a rail bed in Lower Manhattan. Now a city- and pedestrian-scaled outdoor art walk and landscape, the High Line is likely the most influential… Continue reading Underneath, Overlooked
Redesigning Lathrop
Architect Magazine Ι January 2017 The Julia C. Lathrop Homes, built in 1938, are one of the oldest Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) projects in the city. Inspired equally by Ebeneezer Howard’s English Garden Cities and company towns like Pullman on Chicago’s far South Side, Lathrop was designed by a cadre of architects punching below their weight… Continue reading Redesigning Lathrop