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

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?