On Small Offices in Oculus, Summer 2025
8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking Encrypting the Sun by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong

8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking Encrypting the Sun by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong. Edited by Stephen Zacks (Actar, Spring 2025)
Energy generated by nuclear fusion of the Sun reaches the surface of the Earth in 8 minutes and 20 seconds. 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds imagines an architecture based on renewable energy, caching forms of energy that are essentially inexhaustible and persistent, and virtually non-denumerable in quantity. It anticipates a post-scarcity era enabled and reorganized by a new form of housing that serves as an arbiter of post-sustainability human settlements.
Proposing a new form of housing only achievable through advanced manufacturing we ask: “what if what was a housing asset becomes a new form of energy asset whose downstream by-product is shelter?”
Metropolis 100 Community Design Student Projects

"These Students are Reclaiming Community Through Experimental Design: Future100 award–winning student projects reimagine what nurtures society—and what the traditional housing market neglects," Metropolis, June 2025.
Metropolis 100 Architecture Students on Healing Power of Water in Metropolis

"These Architecture Students Explore the Healing Power of Water: Design projects centered on water promote wellness, celebrate infrastructure, and reconnect communities with their environment," Metropolis, Jun. 6, 2025.
Five projects from this year’s METROPOLIS Future100 winners recognize water’s essential role in life, integrating the element into libraries, community centers, wellness retreats, and structures that showcase its impact.
Several students centered their projects on water’s restorative qualities. Marianna Godfrey’s proposal for a wellness retreat at Sweetwater Creek State Park outside of Atlanta, Georgia, attempts to repair the legacies of Cherokee expulsion and slavery by using the ruins of a brick manufacturing plant and cotton mill that used forced labor to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The University of Michigan M. Arch student’s idea is to extend the intervention above a natural stream while providing views and access to the water. The wellness retreat frames the encounters with the natural world as opportunities for meditation for individual and group therapy. “There are significant studies that indicate that any kind of landscape, nature, and water is very helpful for healing, particularly for PTSD treatment,” says Godfrey.
Likewise, University of Texas interior design master’s student Winnie Lin revitalizes a senior living facility in Austin, incorporating a spa retreat, lap pools, jacuzzi, and children’s pool into the structure to help treat arthritis and enhance community access. “Pools are a heavy part of Austin life, and in that area, there was not an accessible pool to the public,” Lin says. “With a diagnosis of arthritis, not only does a pool make sense for seniors, but as a site context, it also fits with the rest of the community at large.”
L.E.S. Ecosocialist Utopias for ABC No Rio 45 at Emily Harvey Foundation

Emily Harvey Foundation, ABC No Rio 45, A Fire in the Forest of Possibilities. Is ‘What If’ Now ‘What Was’? A Walk through the Utopian Loisaida Past and Present, “L.E.S. Ecosocialist Utopias,” Apr. 19. 2025.
The Fascist Assault on Academic Freedom Relies on Thinly Supported Claims of Campus Anti-Semitism on Substack
"The Fascist Assault on Academic Freedom Relies on Thinly Supported Claims of Campus Anti-Semitism," Substack, Mar. 27, 2025.
Do Not Buy US Products Under This Government on Substack

"Do Not Buy US Products Under This Government," Substack, Mar. 10, 2025.
Get Out If You Can Make No Compromise with the Nazi Republicans on Substack

"Get Out If You Can: Make No Compromise with the Nazi Republicans," Substack, Feb. 26, 2025.
Orchard House in Hudson Valley by IDSR Architecture in Dwell

"Budget Breakdown: The Foundation Is Also the Floor at This Shedlike $1.1M Hudson Valley Retreat: A concrete slab and corrugated metal siding root the energy-efficient home in an apple orchard with views of the Catskills," Dwell, February 14, 2025.
"Most of the architects of our generation were made aware of ecological concerns when we were brought up in school," says Rouhe, in part explaining why he and Ibañez de Sendadiano emphasize energy efficiency in their designs. (He’s a graduate of Southern California Institute of Architecture and Columbia University, and Ibañez de Sendadiano of Princeton.) "Still, there was a more formal agenda for the projects. Designing homes is more pragmatic in a way. It’s more utilitarian."
The Green Human Rights Agenda and the Future Democratic Majority on Substack
"The Green Human Rights Agenda and the Future Democratic Majority: An Unpublished Message from August 2024. Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle does not require abandoning all other groups and issues harmed by extremist Republican policies and governance," Substack, Feb. 13, 2025.
Raymond Jungles Redesigns Phipps Ocean Park in Landscape Architecture Magazine

"A South Florida Park Gets a Raymond Jungles Makeover: The redesign of a Palm Beach park will spread the word on native plants," Landscape Architecture Magazine, November 6, 2024.
Interviews with Ya-Ting Liu and Vishaan Chakrabarti, Oculus, Fall 2024

"Living in the Moment," Interviews with Ya-Ting Liu and Vishaan Chakrabarti, Oculus, Fall 2024.
Atrium Architects, ATRIUM Vocabulary of Architecture, "Three Phases" essay, published by Tatlin

ATRIUM Vocabulary of Architecture, "Three Phases," Tatlin, 2024.
As one of the independent young offices emerging in Moscow in the 1990s, Atrium had to confront certain limits. When co-founder Anton Nadtochy graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute in 1994, writing on transformational grammar in the work of Peter Eisenman, his program was called the Theory and History of Soviet and Contemporary Foreign Architecture, where he studied constructivist and modern architecture, later working with one of its professors, Vlad Kirpichev, at his EDAS studio (www.edas-kirpichev.com). At the time, Russia was slowly opening to European and Japanese influences, which had benefitted from more competitive public design processes. But architects often say that limits animate form. Atrium’s response after the office’s 1994 founding by Vera Butko and Anton Nadtochy focused on materiality and complex geometries.
In Moscow as elsewhere, builders were figuring out how to construct theory-driven “paper architecture” that had up to then mostly been an academic provocation, rarely implemented in work-for-hire buildings. Inexpensive, off-the-shelf materials remained pervasive in interiors, but Atrium’s early projects were already raising the level of detail and space planning for corporate and private clients. The firm’s approach emphasized composition of open spatial volumes and geometries, which brought them high-profile commissions like the Novinsky Boulevard offices for Moscol company (1997–98) and the Moscow showroom for famous Italian designer furniture-maker Giulio Cappellini (2001–02).
The Serebryany Bor (“Silver Pinery”) guest house (1999–2004), designed for a client familiar with recent European architecture through travel for business, may best embody the office’s first phase of building-scale work. Located within a nature preserve fifteen minutes from central Moscow, it used a syncopation of contrasting materials, textures, and color tones, as well as the overlapping of two distinct volumes, to explore the resonance of architectural form with its ecological context. Its core orthogonal volume is extensively glazed, softened by walls with wooden cladding, its balconies penetrated by and abutting two preserved pine trees. Around it, half-enclosed in a copper roof, wraps a curving concrete canopy that nods to Le Corbusier’s Ronchamps chapel and the deconstructivist architecture of the moment.
“The main formal strategy was interaction of different shapes, different forms, and every form has its own material, and also we tried to explore complicated geometrical shapes at the time,” Nadtochy says of their early work. “Also, we were very impressed by architectural deconstruction. We tried to create intensive, dynamic space.”
In 2000, Nadtochy and Butko travelled to the Venice Architecture Biennale—the first taking place on a biennial cycle. The starchitect complex that Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilboa had helped propel forward was gaining ground, and the exhibition, entitled Less Aesthetics, More Ethics, curated by Massimiliano Fuksas, was meant to rethink architecture on an urban and metropolitan scale. But for Atrium it represented a watershed in part for the ongoing prominence of form-makers—among them Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Wolf Prix, Thom Mayne, Peter Cook, Toyo Ito, Greg Lynn, Neil Denari, and Ben Van Berkel, . It launched the office on a new trajectory of sculptural architecture—equally influenced by 1960s figures such as Verner Panton, Luigi Colani, Antti Lovag and André Bloc—that sought to heighten aesthetic experience and anticipate another future.
While the Barkli Park residential complex (2007–2013) in Moscow still reflected the first phase of its activities, combining apartments cantilevered over a sports facility into single fluctuating development, for the next decade or so, projects like the house in Gorky (2004–11), KVN (2012–13), and the Krasnodar Expo pavilion (2014–) found Atrium designing larger and larger structures, using light colors to express biomorphic forms. At the same time, the scale of the single-family home and radical transformations of apartment interiors also figured into the second phase of Atrium’s oeuvre in projects like private houses at Sosni Village and Malakhovka, and apartments in Obydensky Lane and Zhukovka Village, where the legacy of the deconstruction in architecture is expressed in the breaking open of spaces through refractive elements. The intersection of two shapes remained a method of iterating the relationship between a building’s functional core and its exterior expression, and they continued to balance sculptural gestures with contrasting textures of materials. They softened the hard-edge formalism of the overall composition at the Gorky house with warm tones of stained wood. In Barkli Park, the glazed and concrete formed are offset by red brick-clad volumes. In Krasnodar, the complex is a syncopation of glass with gray and white panels.
Atrium’s recent ambitions have gotten more expansive, thinking at the scale of entire development complexes, cities, and regions. In the competition for Olonkholand in the Arctic city of Yakutk, Lake Tuvatui in the Ural Mountain of Siberia, and a downtown development for Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, they developed schemes for connecting architecture and landscape to the identity of places and their meaning to local inhabitants, amplifying their cultural identities within the context of globalizing economic forces.
“Symbolic structures are becoming more and more important, especially when we work in very specific regions,” Vera Butko says. “Now it’s becoming more and more important for us how to define local identity or create a new identity of a territory.”
This strategy is particularly apparent in Atrium’s competition for Tobolsk, a city in Siberia where vernacular log structures are identified with the history of the region. Atrium’s design for a multifunctional cultural center begins from an original wooden structure and extrudes it into a complex parametric form to house an open amphitheater, a coworking space, education/ afterschool programs, an auditorium for dancing and singing, and ultimately, a new city square with landscaped hills and parking below. It evokes the kind of urban space that Kevin Lynch wrote about in The Image of the City: not a solitary object but a moving set of parts, perceived from a variety of positions, fragmented by individual experiences; a composite, constantly modified by different users.
“This mix of simple shapes creates a new complicated architectural shape,” Nadtochy says. “We see it as a visible and clear symbol, but on the other hand, the spatial structure is not so simple. From a spatial point of view and in terms of movement inside the building, there are many rules of movement connected to the surrounding landscape.”
Atrium’s most recent commissions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, and Almaty reflect an extended embrace of complexity and a multifaceted approach to design and project delivery, which has been met by public planning policies that encourage innovation of building silhouettes and shapes, beyond surface materials. “It’s a good trend, and we are very happy about it, because we were always thinking about shapes more than facades,” says Nadtochy. “Facades are just decoration. The visual diversity of this environment is important.”
In its Symbol complex of residential towers on the grounds of a former Serp and Molot (“Hammer and Sickle”) metal fabrication company and its Primavera towers on the site of the former Tushino airfield, both located just outside of Moscow, gentle curvatures of building envelopes and a play of light and dark materials on facades combine with urban design on the ground plane that recalls the best qualities of old historic cities, in which streetscapes flowed in sync with the sloping topography of rivers and landscapes. Atrium’s Pedestrian Green and Zil bridge projects in Almaty and Moscow equally fuse soothing non-orthogonal lines across urban infrastructures, softened by naturalized features and animated with lighting schemes that respond to the human need for greenery and visual stimulation.
It’s a set of ideas that the office is applying even when it comes to an extensive school in Sochi, skyscrapers in Moscow, an all-seasons eco-gallery in St. Petersburg, speculative developments from its new office in the United Arab Emirates, and experiments in virtual interactive spaces for the first Metaverse Architectural Biennale. In the challenging environment of 2020s, Atrium has managed to not only survive but create dynamic work that engages public space and imagines another future. “The situation is very unstable,” says Nadtochy. “What could architecture be if it doesn’t have the restrictions which we have in real architecture?”
Garden Dwelling in Gwalior, India by Studio Dashline in Dwell

"This Leafy Green Garden Dwelling in India Has an Endless Pool: Studio Dashline designs a lush home for a family in Gwalior with local materials, contemporary flourishes, and a stargazing aperture for nighttime swims," Dwell, August 19, 2024.
Man on Fire: Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology at WhiteBox
Man on Fire: Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology at WhiteBox, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, Aug. 8, 2024.
It’s important for Juan Puntes, founder of WhiteBox, to stipulate that the art space, located on Avenue B just above Houston Street, is not a gallery. Despite the name, suggesting a traditional blank-walled exhibition environment, WhiteBox belongs to the “alternative space” tradition, rooted in the artist-run galleries in SoHo and Tribeca in the 1960s and seventies. It’s a not-for-profit organization founded in Chelsea in 1998 and supported by grants from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council for the Arts, its production costs partly offset by co-curators and collaborators.
In WhiteBox’s current iteration, opened in 2022 after a four-year stint in Harlem, Puntes skinned the walls in unfinished OSB—not even plywood with a nice wood veneer, as if to preclude the misunderstanding of its being a traditional art gallery. The rough environment conveys a sense of being improvised that comports with the spirit of Puntes—and of everything in New York City and the world, frankly. Everything is moving so quickly, transitioning, developing, living and dying. It’s imperfect, and it suits Puntes’s latest effort to stage a little art-world rebellion, one small show at a time.
WhiteBox’s current exhibition, Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology, on view through August 10, pitches itself as “a symbolic space that addresses issues like food sovereignty, rewilding, ecofeminisms, hydrofeminisms, and restorative aesthetics” and “researches, experiments, and builds knowledge around the Democracy of the Air, Earth, and Water.” That sounds like a lot. Yet the method, in the hands of Puntes, is modest, personable, and intellectually engaging. Puntes’s earnest openness, along with staff curator Yohanna Roa, to conversations with everyone who gazes through the window and walks through the door—untutored neighborhood residents and art history PhDs alike—means the level of discourse stays personal, one to one, meeting others where they’re at, even when Puntes is spinning out a dozen references and associations for every idea, as he often does.
. . .
Sometimes, when it’s furthering our thinking or challenging received ideas—and not merely repeating unquestioned ideas stagnating among us for lack of a will to think—artwork can be a form of communication that offers a combination of aesthetic delight, intellectual excitement, and glimpses of hopeful possibilities. Attending these exhibitions can give a sense of community and belonging, and a degree of solace at times when the discourse and functional operation of actual democratic electoral politics seems utterly impossible to influence positively, such as the perpetually frozen conflict in the Middle East. Maybe with a piece like Stefano Cagol’s Far Before and After Us, which captures images of the artist on Norway’s Golta Island, lit as if the craggy rock formations are bubbling out of volcanic lava—the individual human against fire—we can feel a slight primal connection to the time-scales in which that which is sedimentary and seemingly unchangeable is still in a process of creation.
Full text at https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/at-whitebox-by-stephen-zacks/6517