Author: zachmortice

July 2016 Ι Architect Magazine Just five years old, Seattle-based Best Practice Architecture and Design has amassed a broad portfolio of residential, commercial, office, and restaurant projects. What distinguishes the firm is its ability to deliver an extra level of craft to clients by collaborating with photographers, metal sculptors, and neon artists on the city’s… Continue reading Next Progressives: Best Practice Architecture and Design

July 11, 2016 Ι Line Shape Space  Biomimicry is the imitation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems; biomimicry in architecture and manufacturing is the practice of designing buildings and products that simulate or co-opt processes that occur in nature. There are ultrastrong synthetic spider silks, adhesives modeled after gecko feet,… Continue reading Nature Does It Better: Biomimicry in Architecture and Engineering

Doggerel Ι July 1, 2016  Uber, Airbnb, WeWork: every day, entrepreneurs find new ways to diffuse the ownership of expensive infrastructure in order to drive down prices. But while today’s sharing economy tends to focus on individual consumers, the concept could find creative new applications in the public sector. For example, urban schools contain many different… Continue reading The sharing economy comes to urban public schools

Architect Magazine Ι June 2016 There may be grander examples of Hazelbaker Rush’s commitment to material craft and modernist refinement, but perhaps the most direct distillation of the Tuscon, Ariz.–based architecture firm’s design process can be found in the bathroom of Mabel Street Residence, a 1927 Spanish Colonial Revival bungalow that co-founders Darci Hazelbaker, Assoc.… Continue reading Next Progressives: Hazelbaker Rush

Landscape Architecture Magazine Ι June 2016 IN RECENT ISSUES OF STUDENT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE JOURNALS, there are articles about the landscape implications of graffiti, the ghost towns of the industrial Arctic, the consolidation of rural Midwest post offices, transit networks of the nuclear waste storage industry, and (unavoidably) how the Internet affects perceptions of landscape. This wide… Continue reading Class Consciousness: Landscape Students Plunge into Publishing to Define What Matter to Them

OZY Ι June 13, 2016 Last fall at an exhibition in Chicago, something was pumping and hissing. Twenty-two tanks, all in a stack, filled with water and framed in wood. Weird art? But clearly it was some kind of wall system. So … weird architecture? And getting closer doesn’t clarify matters. The name of this oddity:… Continue reading Buildings that Grow, Breathe, and Burn Calories

Architectural Record Ι May 25, 2016 For some, architecture has a unique ability to transpose fantasies into reality. And if you were an urbane heterosexual male in the last half of the 20th century, there weren’t many better fantasy generators than Playboy. In its pages, this debonair lifestyle was told and sold through Modern architecture and design:… Continue reading Review of Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979

Metropolis Magazine Ι May 24, 2016   In Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, the first film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel, you get the entire litany of architecture-run-amok as it appears in virtually any cultural product. There’s the architect as mad visionary, capable of bringing astounding visions of the future into the present but unable to dictate their evolution… Continue reading Architecture Isn’t the Villain of “High-Rise”—We Are