Author: zachmortice

Line/Shape/Space Ι March 2, 2016  Imagine robotic architectural-fabrication components that can wiggle, crawl, and amble together into architectural space, more or less unbidden. The London-based Spyropoulos Design Lab at the Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) is working to make that a reality. At first, it sounds like a cold and impersonal way to create architecture:… Continue reading Self-Assembling Structures: What If Buildings Were Made by Swarming Robotic Creatures?

Metropolis Magazine Ι Feb. 11, 2016 One hundred years ago it was much harder to expand the traditional boundaries of architecture than it is today. The reasons for this are easily identified; it’s now infinitely easier to move people and information across the globe. For an example of the long and laborious process it once took to… Continue reading When Frank Lloyd Wright Was on the Outside Looking In, He at Least Had Company

Contract Design Magazine Ι Jan./Feb. 2016 For nearly 25 years, the University of Southern Denmark-Kolding (SDU-Kolding) had been housed in a 100-year-old former hospital. This makeshift solution offered students few amenities and reinforced a commuter campus atmosphere that administrators were anxious to shed. “We had no common space there,” says Per Krogh Hansen, SDU-Kolding’s head of… Continue reading Education Interior Awards: University of Southern Denmark, Campus Kolding

CityLab Ι Feb. 2, 2016 Environmentalists have been chiding us for decades: You can’t throw something “away.” Whether they’re just out of our sight or hundreds of miles distant, the things we consume and discard have an environmental impact. Landscape architect and Illinois Institute of Technology professor Conor O’Shea sees a similar misconception in urbanism. There’s… Continue reading Could Freight Hubs Become Eco-Villages?

Line Shape Space Ι Jan. 21, 2016  They’re the twin pillars of the American dream and the current climate predicament: the single family detached house and the automobile—the convenience, freedom, and independence enabled by inefficient and finite fossil fuels. As such, much of the urban-planning and architecture industries are focused on ways to radically subvert this inherited infrastructural… Continue reading Integrated Energy Systems: This Building and Car Create a Symbiotic Relationship to Leave the Electric Grid Behind

CityLab Ι Jan. 19, 2016 In the rarefied air of architecture biennials, like the one that just wrapped up in Chicago, suburban architecture is less than an oxymoron—it basically doesn’t exist. When talented building designers gather, they don’t spend much time thinking about the predominant way Western nations house their citizenry. It’s easy to blame suburbanites’ conservative… Continue reading Is This the Suburban House 2.0?

Jan. 15, 2016 Ι Metropolis  With this year’s Pritzker Prize awarded to Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, 2016 will be remembered as the year architecture’s most eminent institutions rallied around a vision of architecture as a social, ameliorative practice. Aravena, 48, has centered his practice around a string of clever social-housing projects set in developing-world nations. He’s bringing that expertise to the 2016… Continue reading Alejandro Aravena Awarded Pritzker Prize

CityLab Ι Jan. 5, 2016  For 100 years, the moat surrounding Fort bij Vechten in the Dutch province of Utrecht was used to deter and repel attackers. Today it draws people to a cultural space that celebrates wild feats of landscape engineering; recasts the role of water with technocratic precision; and reuses military infrastructure as a… Continue reading How a Defensive Moat Became a Top Tourist Attraction