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Zach Mortice

Zach Mortice

is a Chicago-based design journalist and critic focused on architecture and landscape architecture’s relationship to public policy.
Latest Stories
Red Line Extension

CTA’s largest-ever expansion reaches out to fulfill a transit gap

High in the Sky, Where the Money Stacks Up  

Thomas Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers 1934-1986 offers a wide survey of high rises across the socioeconomic spectrum

New Life for LaSalle

In downtown Chicago, office conversions are being used to create affordable housing

Under Threat

SOM’s Baxter International suburban office park is part of a vital but unheralded design legacy

Let the Right One In

Public access to Edgar Miller’s Kogen-Miller Studios is on pause as dueling lawsuits play out

The Warehouse in Chicago viewed from street
“Waiting On My Angel”

Preservation Chicago names The Warehouse, the birthplace of house music, as one of the most endangered buildings in Chicago

The $2 Billion Question

Chicago critic Blair Kamin’s Who is the City For? takes aim at aesthetic bungles while thornier issues go largely unaddressed

illustration of a sustainable high-rise
Upward, with Form and Policy

IIT and CTBUH launch new tall-buildings degree programs

exterior rendering of a community health hub
Health Prescription

The Focal Point Community Campus promises to expand healthcare in a Chicago neighborhood where it’s badly needed. So why isn’t everyone on board?

protesting architects hit the street demanding fair working conditions
Labor Parti

AIA must do more to address exploitative workplace conditions, some members say

A before and after flooding map of coastal new york, part of a Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation
The Changing Tide

Climate change is teaching designers to expand their horizons—or at least it should

The restored Pullman Company Town , now a park
Green Labor

The restoration of Chicago’s former Pullman Company Town commemorates a pivotal site of progressive American labor

photograph depicting a museum gallery with partition walls painted yellow, green, red, and blue
Comic Treatment

At MCA Chicago’s latest blockbuster, there’s more to comics than just the funnies

Construction rendering of a squat boxy home in on olive
The Opposite of Ticky-Tacky?

On Olive wants to build community through design, but will it push out an existing St. Louis residents?

Looking at the jagged curtain wall of the One hundred tower, with vertical louvers between glass
Crowning Achievement

Studio Gang crowns St. Louis with a new crystalline residential tower

Exterior of the Willert Park Courts public housing complex with blue pergola in front of the entrance
Whose History?

Buffalo says its first National Register–eligible African American housing project can’t be saved. Preservationists beg to differ.

Protestors massed in front of a school-to-loft conversion
What We Talk About When We Talk About Architecture

Op-ed: Architecture critics have a duty to interrogate inequality in the built environment

photograph of a community event at a Chicago public school
Your Friendly Neighborhood Designer

Design Trust Chicago seeks to address systems beyond structures

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