Zach Mortice
Appearances
Conspiracy Theories
The Colossal Reach of the Tartarian Empire
My name is Zach Mortice. I'm a Chicago-based design critic and journalist.
Conspiracy Theories
The Colossal Reach of the Tartarian Empire
To carve these intricate buildings, you need a massive army of stonemasons, right? And you can generate lots of cut and carved stone in a situation where labor is relatively cheap, and machines are pretty expensive, right? And that's what you had back then. Today, labor is relatively expensive and the machines can churn out stuff on a factory floor really cheaply, right?
Conspiracy Theories
The Colossal Reach of the Tartarian Empire
So that's why our buildings today are kind of minimalist and regularized because their individual components are churned out in factories.
Conspiracy Theories
The Colossal Reach of the Tartarian Empire
They had scaffolding, they had elevators in the early 20th century. There were devices used to kind of quasi mass manufacture some kinds of ornament like terracotta, for example. The technological innovations that allowed something like a gold leaf Capitol dome are pretty easy to find.
Conspiracy Theories
The Colossal Reach of the Tartarian Empire
So modern architecture is a set of ideas that emerged in the early to mid 20th century and gained really widespread acceptance all over the world after World War II. And this is an architecture that prizes above all economy, simplicity, and minimalism. It often saw the architecture styles of the past that were very ornate and flowery and expressive as wasteful and kind of profligate.
Conspiracy Theories
The Colossal Reach of the Tartarian Empire
When old buildings were built, electricity was expensive or non-existent, didn't really have air conditioning. But maybe sometimes the guy building the building didn't want the people working in the basement to be in the dark, sweating to death. So they would dig out concrete moat around the building. They put some windows in so you get a little bit of light and air.
Conspiracy Theories
The Colossal Reach of the Tartarian Empire
I think there's some truth in it. I mean, because of how quickly modernism took hold, the built environment of the 1920s looked radically different from the built environment of the 1960s.
Conspiracy Theories
The Colossal Reach of the Tartarian Empire
People have the elementary school that they went to torn down, and they see a pretty gross five-by-five apartment building that they can't afford to live in put in its place. Then, yeah, that's also kind of real cultural disjunction rooted in the built environment.
Conspiracy Theories
The Colossal Reach of the Tartarian Empire
When I first started looking at Tartarian stuff, there's a populist impulse. From the outset, yeah, there is a suspicion of people in power. There's a distrust of elites. There's a distrust of elite-run institutions.
Conspiracy Theories
The Colossal Reach of the Tartarian Empire
A lot of Tartarian stuff is people just getting gassed up on how cool old buildings were. And sometimes it's not even clear if they really believe that there was a world-spanning, hyper-advanced empire. It's just like, wouldn't it be cool if? Wouldn't it be cool if there was some frontier of knowledge that's fantastical and amazing outside of my day-to-day existence?
Conspiracy Theories
The Colossal Reach of the Tartarian Empire
You can look for my writing in Bloomberg City Lab, the New York Review of Architecture, Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and elsewhere.