Oct. 26, 2021 Ι Architect’s Newspaper A lot can happen in the space between a book’s title and subtitle, as A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation: Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy (Island Press, 2021) demonstrates. Here, in a reversal from the norm, the subtitle assumes the more evocative bent by elevating design to the same status… Continue reading Climate change is teaching designers to expand their horizons—or at least it should
Author: zachmortice
The restoration of Chicago’s former Pullman Company Town commemorates a pivotal site of progressive American labor
October 25, 2021 Ι Architect’s Newspaper When Andrea Terry, a principal at the Chicago architecture firm Bauer Latoza Studio began working on the renovation of the Pullman Administration Clock Tower Building in 2017, it had no floor, lots of racoons, and trees growing inside. “It was in a terribly sad state,” she said, a tragic… Continue reading The restoration of Chicago’s former Pullman Company Town commemorates a pivotal site of progressive American labor
The City We Refuse to See
October 2021 Ι New York Review of Architecture, #23 Review: Candyman (2021 version), directed by Nia DaCosta. Spoilers ahead. In Candyman, the 1992 film and its 2021 remake, a killer slips past walls and phases in and out of mirrors. This gore-soaked terror inhabits the shadow-realms of crumbling public housing blocks. He skulks the empty… Continue reading The City We Refuse to See
Re-Shaped by Crisis, an “Anti-Biennial” Reimagines Chicago
Oct. 2, 2021 Ι Bloomberg CityLab The 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial was held, like its two predecessors, in the Chicago Cultural Center, a sumptuous late-19th-century meeting hall in the downtown Loop. Two years later, rocked by Covid-19 and local protests against police violence, North America’s largest architecture and design show finds itself in very different surroundings.… Continue reading Re-Shaped by Crisis, an “Anti-Biennial” Reimagines Chicago
At MCA Chicago’s latest blockbuster, there’s more to comics than just the funnies
Oct. 1, 2021 Ι Architect’s Newspaper The parallels between architecture and comics have not gone unremarked upon. There is, of course, a shared proclivity for world-building, as well as a reliance on grid, contour, line. But there’s one other point of commonality: both mediums tend to suffer when transplanted to the gallery context. That Chicago… Continue reading At MCA Chicago’s latest blockbuster, there’s more to comics than just the funnies
Why the Gaza Strip May be the City of the Future
Sept. 26, 2021 Ι Bloomberg CityLab When Americans turned on the TV or glanced at their smartphones for news of the deadly clashes that engulfed the Gaza Strip in May — or if they followed the more recent spasm of violence in August that threatened to break the region’s fragile truce — many saw scenes that looked familiar: streets flooded with protesters, engaged in… Continue reading Why the Gaza Strip May be the City of the Future
A Radical Idea in Chicago: A Biennial that Listens and Builds
Sept. 22, 2021 Ι Architectural Record By the end of the opening weekend of the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial(CAB) on Sunday, September 19, I’d been prayed over by parishioners of the Rock of Ages Missionary Baptist Church at 13th Street and Pulaski Road, and thanked for sharing the Good News of the West Side of… Continue reading A Radical Idea in Chicago: A Biennial that Listens and Builds
Watershed Moments
Aug. 3, 2021 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine This month, on the riverside terrace of a former pump house in Columbus, Indiana, an exaggerated topographic model of the Mississippi watershed will be installed. It is a hardier object than models meant for conference rooms or museum galleries. In fact, the model’s designer, Derek Hoeferlin, Affiliate ASLA,… Continue reading Watershed Moments
The Opposite of Ticky-Tacky?
Aug. 13, 2021 Ι Architect’s Newspaper Audrey Ellermann has lived in St. Louis’s Covenant Blu Grand Center neighborhood for two decades and seen the area’s fortunes wax and wane. With a history of abandonment and decay, Grand Center is now part of a growing arts district backed by the city’s wealthiest. As president of the… Continue reading The Opposite of Ticky-Tacky?
(Re)Building Culture at AIA’s 2021 Conference on Architecture
August 3, 2021 Ι Architect Magazine After the social, emotional, political, and economic fissures of a year-plus of pandemic, AIA’s 2021 Conference on Architecture is happening in the same place as last year—namely, on your computer. In these fractious times, the virtual conference has a special focus on how to weave continuity and perseverance through… Continue reading (Re)Building Culture at AIA’s 2021 Conference on Architecture