Zach Mortice
@zachmortice
Chicago design journalist and critic, @bloomberg.com and elsewhere. In one of those phases where I can’t decide whether it matters what buildings look like or not.
I ask you: Who but @blaservations.bsky.social @presfutures.bsky.social could write the history of Inland Architect?!?!?!? mascontext.com/observations...
Gonna be real disappointed if this is not a long-simmering Nathan For You bit
Generative AI is the biggest thing to hit Tartaria since the discovery of ancient architecture magazines from 1923.
Even if this wasn’t the only way forward and you were purely self-interested in your industry’s bottom line, this would be a massive wealth transfer from the extraction/fossil fuel sector to the design industry and would get architects a lot of 💵🤑💵🤑💵🤑💵🤑 www.archpaper.com/2026/08/gree...
The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit is the apotheosis of museum-as-factory/warehouse-of-cultural-production. [pls forgive the Instagram filter overload, I took these photos in 2014]
Ok so here is Henri Lefebvre in The Right to the City tracing 60+ years of urban displacement, gentrification, surveillance, and consumption in one paragraph
Imagine assassinating people for the maintenance of the worldwide neoliberal order and then getting snatched up by some yee-haw golden spray paint right-wing populist whose base are all jet ski dealership owners
I’m holding back my Obama Presidential Center takes till I file my piece, but I will say it’s rare for a building to dare critics to make the building a metaphor for a historic figure so flagrantly while that figure and their entire political apparatus are so throughly despised
I downloaded a few files from the FBI's official archive and now I'm locked out and this is what I see if I try to access another file.
As we gear up for the opening of the Obama Library, let's remember that ppl have been struggling to develop urban planning strategies that allow for neighborhood-based self-determination in Woodlawn for a long time. Here's Jane Jacobs in Architectural Forum, 1962 www.usmodernist.org/AF/AF-1962-0...
Deep cut from the August 1969 issue of Progressive Architecture Magazine and the hothouse of stalled revolutionary organizing. We gotta bring back ACRONYM (Architecture, Come Revolution or Not, Your Move)!
A Palestinian architect sent me this quick, dark comedy meditation on the ways the West fetishizes struggle & resistance in the global periphery, & a [chef's kiss] drawing of a donkey hanging out amid some Brutalism. I am frankly amazed something like this has not already occurred.
Should probably mention the illustrations by Lane Rick are exquisite
New collective moral mandate for architecture just dropped. My review of Antifascist Architecture by Daniel Roche and Andrew Santa Lucia in @archpaper.com. www.archpaper.com/2026/04/anti...
Already out there debunking the idea that we're gonna come up with the shape that eliminates racism way back in the Nixon admin, true king, love to see it.
Michael Sorkin in 1972 on the pointlessness of aesthetic moralism, design's lack of autonomy, dunking on Buckminster Fuller and technosaviorism, program and process as the true locus of radicalism, degrowth and refusal, all in one of his first clips, when he was like 12 years old
Emotionally, spiritually, and physically, I exist at the intersection of Domenico Dragonetti’s 19th century upright bass and Daniel Libeskind’s custom paint-jobbed scooter
Part of it is the hyper-consistent archive lighting, but it is really hard to take a bad picture here, even if I’m in it.
Love 2 experience a wholly new building typology. V&A Storehouse East is 🧨💥💯
We could have avoided so much useless aesthetic moralism by making sure that all brutalist buildings have generous landscaping budgets. [Neave Brown’s Alexandra Road Estate in London, 1978]