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?
Author: zachmortice
(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
Taking Back the Table
July 2021 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine “Agriculture represents the largest anthropogenic land use in the world” says Forbes Lipschitz, and thus a critical venue for landscape design. Yet agriculture remains critically under-researched in landscape architecture. Last fall, instead of directly tackling agriculture systems with design prescriptions, Lipschitz, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at The Ohio… Continue reading Taking Back the Table
When Monuments Go Bad
June 7, 2021 Ι Bloomberg CityLab The stately eagle atop the 50-foot-tall fluted column of the Illinois Centennial Monument can be seen from blocks away. Located in the gentrifying Logan Square neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side, the memorial was designed by Henry Bacon and Evelyn Beatrice Longman and built in 1918 as an allegorical representation… Continue reading When Monuments Go Bad
Is this library politics?
April 28, 2021 Ι The Chicago Reader Drive south on the Bishop Ford Expressway to Altgeld Gardens and you’ll pass plenty of reminders you’re in a landscape not meant for inquisitive visitors. There are looming grain silos next to a parked shipping freighter, a village-scaled water reclamation plant, and plenty of anonymous warehouses. But once you… Continue reading Is this library politics?
Whose History?
March 1, 2021 Ι Architect’s Newspaper Built in 1939, Willert Park Courts in Buffalo, New York, was among the first public housing projects in the country. These ten two- and three-story rectilinear buildings are arranged north to south on parallel tracks around a central courtyard. They were an American echo of German Zeilenbau modernist planning,… Continue reading Whose History?
How a Plan to Save Buildings Fell Apart
April 7, 2021 Ι Bloomberg’s CityLab (with Elizabeth Blasius) In 2018, Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development felt that they had a progressive plan to preserve one of the city’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Pilsen, on the city’s southwest side, was home to Eastern European immigrants in the 19th century; in the 20th century, it drew… Continue reading How a Plan to Save Buildings Fell Apart
Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture
April 27, 2021 Ι Bloomberg’s CityLab In 1908, architect Ernest Flagg completed the Singer Building in Lower Manhattan, a Beaux-Arts showstopper made for the Singer sewing machine company. From a wide base, a slender 27-story tower rose, topped by a mansard roof and a delicate lantern spire. Every inch dripped with sumptuous detail inside and… Continue reading Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture
What We Talk About When We Talk About Architecture
February 12, 2021 Ι Architects Newspaper In early June, I put on a white KN95 mask and a black sweater and left my apartment like thousands of other Chicagoans to protest the murder of Black Americans by police. An hour or so of marching and chanting culminated at an intersection near my home dominated by… Continue reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Architecture
Who’s Around Underground?
February 2021 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine Republic Square in Austin, Texas, is one of the city’s most historic, sensitive, and heavily trafficked public green spaces. In the heart of downtown, it’s one of the original four public squares dating back to the city’s founding. In 1839, the city’s initial run of surveyed and platted blocks… Continue reading Who’s Around Underground?