Author: zachmortice

Line/Shape/Space Ι Sept. 14, 2015 The Axiom House will take half the time typically required to build a four-bedroom, two-bath home. Plugged into the nation’s fastest commercial Internet service, nearly 40 monitoring systems in the Axiom will regulate temperature, oversee the safety of occupants, and dispatch robots to mow the lawn. It’ll consume net-zero energy, with… Continue reading A Net-Zero House for $220K? It’s All in How It’s Put Together

Architect Magazine Ι September 2015  Design with Company’s Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer have a modest body of experimental and built projects that exist somewhere between Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In their investigative studio, the Chicago-based couple explores Midwestern building archetypes and institutions that are bizarrely iconic. Their projects are playful and surreal,… Continue reading Next Progressives: Design With Company

Line/Shape/Space Ι Sept, 1, 2015 Buildings simply aren’t made like anything else—that goes for sunglasses, furniture, appliances, and fighter jets. No other production process brings massive amounts of material to one place, constructs one item, and then hauls away the garbage. The inefficiencies are monumental. Modular construction has promised a great deal of potential to reduce… Continue reading 4 Ways a Robot or Drone 3D Printer Will Change Architecture and Construction

AIA This Week Ι Aug. 7, 2015 Ι The winner of the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Lakefront Kiosk Competition reinvents Mies for the Midwest’s metropole For the thousands of visitors to this fall’s Chicago Architecture Biennial (sponsored in part by the AIA), and for residents themselves, Chicago is still Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s city. The German émigré’s stern-faced, steel-beamed skyscrapers… Continue reading Tectonics of the Ideal Kiosk

Line/Shape/Space Ι Aug. 4, 2015 At first glance, there isn’t a lot separating the sustainable soap gurus of Method from previous generations of bleeding-edge ambitious capitalists that came to the Chicago neighborhood of Pullman to fulfill their dreams. Like railcar manufacturer magnate George Pullman in 1880, Method’s founders Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry came to the… Continue reading Method Soap Factory Scrubs Manufacturing Clean

INT Journal Ι July 22, 2015 Before its release in 1965, French New Wave director Jean-Luc Goddard wanted to call Alphaville, his ultra-pulpy sci-fi noir Tarzan vs. IBM. It’s the story of a thuggish and volatile secret agent sent to destabilize a totalitarian regime run by a hyper-rational computer that’s sanded down any display of… Continue reading Alphaville is 50: After Modernism Lost it Meaning, it Still had its Looks

Architect Magazine  Ι June 15, 2015 Ι The New York firm of Alex Mustonen and Daniel Arsham injects humor (and removes color) from its products and projects. The well-trodden intersection of art and architecture is where Snarkitecturepractices, but the New York–based studio’s uncanny spaces exist in a place “adjacent to real life.” Firm founders Alex Mustonen, who studied architecture at… Continue reading Next Progressives: Snarkitecture

Line/Shape/Space Ι July 9, 2015  Commissioned in the depths of the Great Recession, Federal Center South, the Army Corp of Engineers’ regional headquarters in Seattle, was funded by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. But stimulus money came with big strings attached—namely strenuous requirements that it had to be built very, very quickly and very, very… Continue reading Sustainable Building Projects and BIM: 200,000 Sq. Ft. Government Office One of Best in Nation

Metropolis Ι June 2015 Ι Chicago’s Design with Company fashions an architectural garden party for the third annual Ragdale Ring Pavilion. Tucked away on the sleepy Gilded Age campus of the Ragdale Foundation in Chicago’s northern suburbs, the third annual Ragdale Ring Pavilion beams with youthful allure. The temporary timber structure strikes a Pac-Man–like profile, framing a stage for summer performances… Continue reading Postmodern Proscenium

Architectural Record Ι June 3, 2015  Chicago’s 606, the nation’s second elevated rails-to-trails park, will open June 6, and its designers and client have taken pains to ensure that it’s a unique expression of the Second City, not just to be compared to New York’s High Line. In form, function, and funding, the 606’s evolution has taken a… Continue reading Chicago’s 606 Elevated Park Set for Weekend Opening