May 2023 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine The trading post in Round Rock, Arizona, near the dead-center of the Navajo Nation Reservation, had been many things over many years. Over its 120-year history, the trading post offered groceries and prepared food, and served as Round Rock’s post office. It sold traditional Navajo crafts, gasoline, and meat… Continue reading Listen and Unlearn
Author: zachmortice
After School Closings, a Renovation Challenge
Bloomberg CityLab Ι Oct. 9. 2023 Dwight Perkins isn’t among the most familiar names associated with Chicago architecture. But unlike Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, his work left a particularly vivid impression on the childhoods of generations of Chicagoans from all corners of the city, because he designed their schools.
With a Full Opening Still Ahead, the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Fifth Edition Commences at Select Sites
Oct. 2, 2023 Ι Architectural Record Themed “This is a Rehearsal” and organized by art and design collective Floating Museum, the fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 5) sees the biennial as a city-wide collaborative and spontaneous cultural happening; a reflection of the simultaneously banal and grand ambitions that create urbanism every day. “For us, the… Continue reading With a Full Opening Still Ahead, the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Fifth Edition Commences at Select Sites
Preservationists Don’t Put Too Fine a Point On It in Their Maximalist Postmodern Reno
Sept. 2023 Ι Dwell An architect/preservationist and a city planner/1980s-vibe channeler, Jonathan Solomon and Meg Gustafson are fluid aesthetic experts. But when it came time to design a house together after getting married, they weren’t interested in a ground-up project. They wanted “something that already had authenticity,” says Meg. But also “something that we wouldn’t… Continue reading Preservationists Don’t Put Too Fine a Point On It in Their Maximalist Postmodern Reno
Apocalypse-Proof
Sept. 12, 2023 Ι Places Journal When it was completed in Lower Manhattan in 1974, 33 Thomas Street, formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, was intended as the world’s largest facility for connecting long-distance telephone calls. 1 Standing 532 feet — roughly equivalent to a 45-story building — it’s a mugshot for Brutalism,… Continue reading Apocalypse-Proof
Step Down, Splash Down
June 15, 2023 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine A few years ago, if you wanted to visit the site of Cascade Park in Chicago, designed by Claude Cormier + Associés (now CCxA), you’d find yourself near the shores of Lake Michigan at a 50-foot cliff overlooking a vacant pit bordered by a foreboding service road that… Continue reading Step Down, Splash Down
Top of the Rock
July 20, 2023 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine Faced with the need for a meditative and richly planted landscape for an affordable and supportive housing project in the Bronx on top of exposed bedrock, Brian Green, a landscape architect at Terrain-NYC, looked to the other geologic formations in Manhattan, particularly in Central Park, and in the… Continue reading Top of the Rock
Bet the House
March 2023 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine Pulling off the road during a hot and sticky New York City summer day two years ago, and into the Berry public housing complex on Staten Island, Kate Belski of Grain Collective had a bit of a revelation. She found herself in a central lawn dotted with trees, surrounded… Continue reading Bet the House
High in the Sky, Where the Money Stacks Up
August 31, 2023 Ι Architects’ Newspaper In the 1960s, the same Chicago city agency conjured some of the worst and the best in American residential high-rises, and in rapid succession. The Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) Robert Taylor Homes were the nation’s largest public housing project when they opened in 1963: the buildings locked in a… Continue reading High in the Sky, Where the Money Stacks Up
What Landscapers Can Teach Landscape Architects
July 26, 2023 Ι Bloomberg CityLab At one of the nation’s most prestigious landscape architecture schools, the summer studio of Ohio State University professor Michelle Franco has students learning how to pull up weeds, prune trees and mix soil. Sometimes, this calls for expertise beyond what Harvard-educated Franco can provide. So she brings in the… Continue reading What Landscapers Can Teach Landscape Architects