Zach Mortice

Chicago

Web Editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine

Design journalist and critic, contributing writer w/ @citylab.

Articles

At the National Public Housing Museum, an Embattled Idea Finds a Home

2 weeks ago | bloomberg.com | Zach Mortice

The museum has made its home in a 1938 building that once anchored Jane Addams Homes, a 1,000-unit public housing project that was demolished in the 2000s. (Bloomberg) -- The items on display at the new National Public Housing Museum in Chicago are almost defiant in their ordinariness.
Chicago Steel Mill To Be Reborn as $9 Billion Quantum Computer Campus

1 month ago | bloomberg.com | Zach Mortice

Life after steel on the South Side of Chicago can be surprisingly beautiful. On a peninsula in Lake Michigan carved out by shipping inlets sits Steelworkers Park, a serene space on the southeast edge of the city that once held the roaring furnaces of US Steel’s South Works. Shoreline trails take visitors past giant industrial artifacts dropped in the landscape like Claes Oldenburg sculptures; a 26-ton blast furnace bell and an iron ingot mold the size of a go-kart.
In Chicago, a Former Steel Mill Looks to Make a Quantum Leap

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Zach Mortice

4 hours agoHow ChatGPT is helping bend websites to my willYou don’t need to know JavaScript to write powerful browser bookmarklets anymore. I’m a writer, not a programmer, so until recently a lot of the hype around ChatGPT’s abitilies as a coding tool went over my head. But then I realized generative AI’s programming powers can be helpful for more than just …1 hour ago55 Years Later, A Forgotten Sci-Fi Thriller Is Still Painfully RelevantThe story of a colossal blunder.
A fight with the Journal of Architectural Education over academic freedom has put the ACSA in crisis

1 month ago | archpaper.com | Zach Mortice

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is an international membership association that represents more than 200 schools of architecture and 7,000 faculty around the world. Last month, as reported by AN, it canceled the Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) themed on Palestine and fired its interim executive editor. The action resulted in the resignation of all 20 members of the JAE editorial board on March 10, shortly before the annual ACSA meeting.
Women Architects Struggled to Find a Home Within Modernism

2 months ago | metropolismag.com | Zach Mortice

American women embraced residential design and offered a counterpoint to the boys club of the International Style, a new book says. By: Zach MorticeThe question at the heart of Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism (by Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D.
Remembering M. Paul Friedberg, Who Made Landscape Architecture Urban

2 months ago | bloomberg.com | Zach Mortice

In 1972, the New York Times described the landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg as one of the “New Left of playground designers” for his radical breaks with tradition. His playgrounds and landscapes emphasized abstract, elemental forms for play and exploration, inserted into gritty New York City public housing projects, light years away from the ornamental gardening approach that spawned the discipline in the 19th century.
Perkins&Will revisits Crow Island School near Chicago

Feb 5, 2025 | archpaper.com | Zach Mortice

Based on a child-centered and scaled view of primary school pedagogy that celebrates learning in landscape and artisanal craft, Crow Island School, in the North Shore Chicago suburb of Winnetka, is typically regarded as the first modernist school in the nation. Now, it is undergoing an exacting renovation and addition that will allow it to function as its original designers intended and will continue its legacy as a school grounded in creative exploration.
Lakisha Woods Exits Role as AIA EVP/CEO

Feb 5, 2025 | architecturalrecord.com | Zach Mortice

This past weekend, Lakisha Woods quietly left her position as EVP/CEO of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), just three years after taking on the role. Woods announced her resignation in December at an in-person all staff meeting, moments before a champagne toast and annual holiday party. “There was an audible gasp,” said one current staffer who spoke to RECORDanonymously.
New Book Explores Brutalist Architecture of France's Communist Party

Feb 1, 2025 | bloomberg.com | Zach Mortice

Let’s say, hypothetically, that there’s a left political party in an affluent Western country. It dominates in urban areas but struggles elsewhere; its working-class voter base has splintered with deindustrialization and more progressive, college-educated factions have emerged. As the nation becomes more multicultural, the party gets increasingly attuned to cultural and identitarian politics, but this doesn’t seem to bring in enough new voters.
In Northern Michigan, a Geodesic Dome Offers Visitors an Escape Pod From Daily Life

Jan 14, 2025 | msn.com | Zach Mortice