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What the mainstream media calls identity politics or “wokism” are largely liberation struggles. But the goal of reclaiming a discriminated-against identity should have a horizon beyond identity. We are supposed to believe the ludicrous proposition that Trump voters are going to support middle-of-the-road, corporate-sponsored, pro-genocidal, anti-“woke” Democrats if they abandon racial equity as a goal. Identity still matters. But not having money in America makes it practically impossible to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. It has become commonplace to talk about “straight white male privilege.” The expression must be a bitter pill if you are homeless, poor, unemployed, without a college education, and living in a place with practically no access to opportunity. Identity can form a basis for essential social and political struggles for freedom. Yet we also need to keep class in mind and keep identity at an arm’s length to enjoy real personal freedom. Link for full text in my profile.
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For fans of architectural drawing, check out this exhibition by Grigori Fateyev at Chesterwood in Stockbridge, Massachusetts during Upstate Art Weekend.

See artformsa.com and stephenzacks.com for full text. @art_forms_architecture @chesterwood_studio

Art Studios: How Artistic Processes Inform Architectural Design, Grigori Fateyev, architect and principal of Art Forms Architecture, May 16–July 16, 2026, Woodshed Gallery, Chesterwood, Stockbridge, Massachusetts

As a 2024 artist-in-residence at Chesterwood, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Grigori Fateyev began a series of drawings exploring the organization of space in the residency’s house and gardens, originally designed by architect Henry Bacon as a Berkshires summer home and studio for prominent late 19th–, early 20th–century sculptor Daniel Chester French. Raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, Fateyev started his academic training in theatrical set design at the State Institute of Theater, Music, and Cinematography before gravitating toward art, and eventually architecture, at Cooper Union. He moved to Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1999 and founded Art Forms Architecture ten years later, since then dedicating himself to tailoring galleries, studios, and homes to the particular habits and work processes of artists. On display through July 16 at Chesterwood’s Woodshed Gallery, alongside three of Fateyev’s designs for artist’s studios and live/work homes in the Hudson Valley and Berkshires, it shows Fateyev’s passion for the thinking process behind design and for the details of architectural drawing. His use of color and line in sketches, watercolors, and aerial site plans reflect the obsession with fine hand-drawn lines—expressive yet suggesting mechanical precision—characteristic of Cooper Union graduates, influenced even today by the tradition of former dean John Hejduk.
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The exhibition is meant to be a step in the direction of an eventual capital fundraising campaign by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to support resident artists and enable the original home—restored in 2014 after more than 115 years of wear and tear—to be more accessible to visitors.
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On the Ruins of the US, Part 3
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On the Ruins of the US, Part Two
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On the Ruins of US, Part One
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Nos complació compartir nuestra propuesta del Congreso Espiral de las Américas para el concurso Mextrópoli, que plantea que la circulación entre todos los países de América debe estar abierta a todos sus habitantes. Proponemos un espacio en espiral de Fibonacci en la Ciudad de México donde participemos en la construcción de la ciudadanía en todo el continente. Imagen, dibujos, y concepto espacial de G.H. Hovagimyan con el concepto de Stephen Zacks, que siguió al proyecto de Amplifier con Al Ramos, y con la colaboración de Liliana Perez Reinaldo.

We are delighted to share our Spiral Congress of the Americas proposal for the Mextrópoli competition, arguing that movement between all countries in the Americas should be open to all. We propose a Fibonacci spiral space in Mexico City where participants join in the production of citizenship across the continent. Image, drawings, and spatial concept by G.H. Hovagimyan with concept by Stephen Zacks, based on the Amplifier concept with Al Ramos, and with assistance from Liliana Perez Reinaldo.
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Read my interview in Art Gangs (edited by @alanw.moore ) with Julio Garcia Murillo @juliogamu co-curator of the exhibition at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo on 1970s political art groups in Mexico, which reproduces examples of essential works of the period and tells the history of this revolutionary moment in post-1968 Mexican culture. Full text at artgangs.blogspot.com

"During the opening of “Groups and Other Uprisings” in early February at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), generations of Mexico City artists and curators converged to celebrate the reappraisal of a critical, lost period in the development of Mexican contemporary art. The political art groups of the 1970s form a crucial missing link to much of what emerged thereafter, although they have been overshadowed by the subsequent generation of famous international figures like Gabriel Orozco and Damián Ortega. The groups in this show were committed activists against political repression and suppression of speech by the government using visual art, graphics, environments, street art, and performance as media to expose information that wasn’t being represented in the news media and civil society, and to organize collectively.
Founded in 2008, MUAC is Mexico’s preeminent contemporary art museum and the first museum dedicated to collecting Mexican art since 1952. With special collections rooted in donations and relationships with the artists of the period, and access to university researchers dedicated to the assembly and study of the collections, it is the only institution that could have mounted such an extensive show and devoted years to situating it in an adequate historical perspective.
The exhibition opened during the 2026 Zona Maco art fair—which since launching in 2002 has stimulated an immense convergence of openings, fairs, talks, and performances in galleries, museums, and alternative spaces throughout the city. This event placed the MUAC at the center of the vibrant Mexican art scene.
I interviewed Julio García Murillo, co-curator and deputy director of public programs at MUAC. He was accompanied by Milene Zozaya, a Mexico City-based artist and educator."
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In the winter 2026 issue of Oculus, "The End of the H-1B Pipeline: What Immigration Policy Means for U.S. Architecture"

A virulently anti-immigrant federal government has imposed new fees and restrictions on H-1B visas and loans for architecture degrees. As a result, access to education and opportunity in the U.S. and the ability of U.S. offices to recruit talented designers are expected to be severely impacted.
The Trump Administration’s new H-1B visa policy practically eliminates the possibility for U.S. architecture offices to hire new noncitizens or non-green-card-holder employees. If not revised, the policy will effectively eliminate a professional pathway for foreign architects and foreign architecture students studying in the U.S. About 9% of the 442,425 H-1B visas approved in 2024—including 141,207 new applications, the rest being renewals—were held by architecture and engineering professionals. (Tech industry workers held 65%.) Combined with other barriers to entry imposed by the U.S. government and its threatening policies toward immigrants and foreigners in general, the policy is already having a radical effect on U.S. architecture offices and architecture schools in terms of hiring and enrollment.

“If the policy is to eliminate immigrants, I do not see how we can continue to do what we do,” says Peter Miller, vice president of professional development on the AIA New York Chapter’s executive board and founding partner of Palette Architecture, an office specializing in multifamily housing. “If tomorrow everyone who is or was on a visa at some point is out of the architecture profession in New York City, we would lose over half of the architects in the city. I don’t see how we could continue to function as a profession if we lost everyone who is some form of immigrant, and the H-1B is an important bridge piece in the immigrant’s journey as an architect.”

The policy, titled “Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers,” was issued on September 19, 2025, by presidential proclamation, going into effect two days later. It mandated that new H-1B visa applications be subject to an additional payment of $100,000.
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In Reuse: Architectures of Almost Nothing, it may be hard to discern the architectural works on display. For the exhibition, which opened in correspondence with Mexico City’s Art Week, the curators invited 15 local and international practices to explore reuse of site-specific materials without creating models of possible structures or functional objects. Central to the cues offered to the architects was the site of the exhibition, Laguna, a converted former thread-and-textile factory, and its surrounding neighborhood, Colonia Doctores, an industrial area with an abundance of car shops on the edge of the rapidly redeveloping Roma and Juárez districts. . . .

The results are ethereal, uncanny, and abstract, recalling the famous 1969 Kunsthalle Bern show Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Becomes Form, which defined the emerging postminimalist and Arte Povera movements of the time. In Free Play (2026), Belgian architects 51N4E’s installation on the main exhibition floor, a pile of orange balls of fabric bundled in perforated green sacks imitates venders’ method of transporting produce to markets. A tented construction of metal tubes contains another collection of fabric oranges, its structure extending from a triangular base into a tubular circle, from which a single faux orange hangs suspended on a thread. At the other end of the gallery floor, Bangkok Tokyo Architecture’s The Horse and the Ox (2026), which consists of four blue barrels, a section of aluminum ductwork, and an assemblage of stepped red bricks, appears to levitate. In reality, each element is raised from the ground by long machine screws bolted to the materials with metal brackets.
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The exhibition, repurposing and giving new meaning to existing materials, is a decent metaphor for Laguna and for the city at large, which is metabolically morphing itself into one of the world’s great global metropolises.

Link in bio

Details from photos by @arturoarrieta_ and @tacodehummus

Thanks editors @yhprumkcaj @isabellinging @archpaper

@edgararl @mariaeninternet @salazarsequeromedina @parabase.eu @ex__soup @samchermayeffoffice @bangkoktokyoarchitecture @51n4e @bplus.xyz @lagunamx
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La ciudad antigua de Teotihuacán, ubicada apenas 45 km afuera del centro de la Ciudad de México, surgió entre 600 BC y 750, contemporánea con Grecia antigua y Roma antigua, mil años antes del imperio azteca y la llegada de los conquistadores españoles. Increíble lugar que incluye el pirámide del sol, el pirámide de la luna, el pirámide de serpientes y la avenida de los muertes. Empecé a entender el valor que da la cultura Mexica a los cráneos y esqueletos, como ofertas que ayudan el viaje del alma a un lugar después de la muerte. Vi que el Día de Muertos es mucho más que una celebración para niños con disfraces pero es un ritual con un lado más grave para recordar los seres queridos. También el pirámide del sol donde enterraron sus ancestros siempre tiene que ver con esa oportunidad extraordinaria de vivir en ese mundo por un buen rato y disfrutar el tiempo como ser consciente encima de nuestra planeta.
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Feliz año, que logren sus metas y cumplan sus deseos en 2026. Todo lo mejor por ustedes. Gracias a todos por asistir en la celebración de comunidad, del sol, del solsticio y del año nuevo. Fotografía oficial de Sergio con la ayuda de Memo, Jaky y todos los demás.
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Stephen Zacks & Mylene Zozaya, a través de _Studio 7_, exploran la formación de vínculos comunitarios a partir de la cocina como práctica compartida. Tres platillos activan el encuentro como un espacio de relación, tiempo común y diálogo no jerárquico, donde cocinar y comer operan como actos de presencia y co-existencia.

Desde la noción de micro-utopía, la experiencia no propone un modelo ideal de comunidad, sino ensayos temporales de lo común: situaciones concretas en las que el hacer cotidiano —preparar alimentos, compartir la mesa— produce relaciones y activa afectos, haciendo visible la latencia de una comunidad en proceso.

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_Stephen Zacks:_ se interesa por analizar la historia cultural y producir proyectos comunitarios para reimaginar ciudades y transformar marcos políticos.

_Mylene Zozaya:_ Combina arte, pensamiento y pedagogía para abrir espacios de conciencia y diálogo.

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_Studio 7_ es un espacio de trabajo, reunión y experimentación que articula prácticas artísticas, pensamiento crítico y creación en formatos abiertos, y que alberga residencias artísticas, proyectos colaborativos y acciones públicas orientadas al intercambio interdisciplinario y la activación cultural.
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Los Angeles, 2012.
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Among the gestures of graciousness that are commonplace in Mexico City, the subtle negotiation of shared public space often requires getting through crowds of people eating tacos, tortas, gorditas, and dorados at the ubiquitous puestos callejeros (food carts) crowded around every metro station; moving past others on staircases and in supermarket isles with a cordial buenas tardes (Good afternoon) and adelante (forward); deciding who goes first through doorways; and always asking before passing through another’s personal space.

As a self-confessed curmudgeon about the unwritten rules of behavior on the street, so often befouled by attention-deprived smartphone users in the last decade, a magic phrase has become a secret password for a more humane and hospitable existence: Con permiso (With your permission). It’s one of several polite little phrases that make Mexico City an especially charming place to live as a foreigner, even a gringo hailing from its imperious northern neighbor, which robbed Mexico of no less than 55% of its territory in 1848 during the Invasión Estadounidense and now has the nerve to complain about Mexican citizens, an essential part of the U.S. labor force, crossing north and south freely. (Freedom of movement throughout the Americas is a fundamental human right of indigenous peoples, and there are UN conventions to support the claim.)

For almost a year now, I have been living in the neighborhood of La Roma, which is probably the biggest cliché for a U.S. citizen living in Ciudad de México. It’s one of the more fashionable areas in the city, with a convenient proximity to galleries, literary readings in bookstores, museum openings, clubs, and bourgeois cafes and restaurants. I cop to that.

Read the full essay at commonedge.org

Thanks so much for the prompt to write about this from @commedgecollab Martin Pedersen, friend and former editor of Metropolis, who assigned me my first magazine features about architecture and urbanism in the 2000s.
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Tucson congressman Raúl Grijalva’s self-portrait and drawings are on display at the Projects/ Space in downtown Tucson. Grijalva died in March. His daughter, a Pima County official, was elected to his seat more than a month ago but has not been sworn in. The drawings are his doodles from meetings and hearings, signed, dated, and annotated. @theprojects_space
Curated by Shannon Smith
@photomomma888
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Check out the fall print issue of @metropolismag for the full story on the climate repair work of @locus______ Locus Architects, Mexico City-based designers of the Venice Pavilion with a group of collaborators including @pedroyjuana Mil gracias a @jachenschleich @sanafrini y editor @pancho_brown !

The way Sana Frini describes it, the heat waves engulfing Europe and the U.S. each year are like a creeping monster slowly moving northward. “The heat advances an average of one meter per hour,” Frini says. “So it’s something that you can literally see moving from the South to the North.” Measurable scientifically and no longer preventable, according to some activists and researchers, the climate crisis becomes a problem of repair and remediation. “Given the state of the world as they have left it to us, I consider myself very much within the discourse of repair,” she says.

Alongside Jachen Schleich, with whom she cofounded Mexico City–based Locus Architects in 2020, Frini has turned her attention to climate reparation, bringing an energetic perspective that borrows from vernacular techniques of subtropical regions to improve resiliency, conserve energy, and maintain the comfort of the human body.

“It’s a bit like the logic of experimenting, prototyping, but above all, analyzing, from a vernacular architectural perspective,” she says of her practice and teaching. “I really believe in an architecture that is not of the epoch of the Anthropocene or of the era of fossil-fuel production.”

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Playing tennis and fomenting revolution…CDMX
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The logical outcome of fascism is the aestheticization of political life. #walterbenjamin #uspolitics #charliekirk #republicannazis
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Last year, an odd piece of news surfaced within the insider world of tennis. It was reported that Jessica Pegula, currently fourth-ranked player in women’s tennis, invited a few lower-ranked players delayed by storms to join a flight to the next tournament on her private jet. Commentators credited her generosity. It might have felt out of place to use her kindness to prompt discussion of the advantage she gained by having access to a private jet. Yet inequality of opportunity and concentration of wealth is especially visible in tennis, reflecting the growing inequality in American society.

It’s a delicate topic: in most other sports, strivers from low-income backgrounds are more common, spurring a stream of human-interest stories about unique talents rising from obscurity. When sports journalists mention Pegula’s wealthy background—her father founded a petroleum fracking company, which he sold for billions of dollars in the 2010s, and he subsequently bought the Buffalo Bills football franchise—they usually emphasize the hard work she dedicates to training. That is unquestionably true: even with the advantages of wealth, you cannot become a top-ranked pro without an incredible amount of perseverance. Yet the crucial aspect of inherited wealth is that it offers players the chance to even be in a position to compete.

@usta @usopen @jonwertheim @tennischannel

Full text at szacks.substack.com
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Pocahontas y La Malinche visitan el Museo Kaluz
Por Yohanna M. Roa @yohannamroa @museokaluz
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Wedged between two large residential towers and two historic buildings on a constrained triangular lot negotiating between low-rise Boerum Hill and rapidly growing downtown Brooklyn, a pair of public schools meeting strict Passive House standards used 1,315 tons of steel and employed smart design, engineering, and construction phasing to create enough space for 850 students. The decision to aim for the highest zero-energy environmental standards added unusual complexity to combining two visually distinct schools in one 146,000-square-foot structure meant to last at least 100 years.

When the project at 80 Flatbush Avenue was announced by Alloy Development in 2017, local residents denounced the scale of the 74- and 38-story mixed-use towers, the tallest originally set to top out at 986 feet. At the center of the block, Alloy planned to partner with the city’s Education Construction Fund, which works with private developers to build public schools accommodating the city’s ever-growing school-age population, issuing bonds to finance construction. But citing the development’s scale, bulk, and proximity to a residential district, the local community board’s land-use committee voted unanimously against the necessary rezoning. Without it, the towers could only reach a maximum of 400 feet.

Four months later, however, the City Planning Commission approved the rezoning anyway. Then, spurred by elected officials mediating between local opponents and the developers, Alloy agreed to reduce the height of the tallest structure by 146 feet, still more than twice as tall as the zoning otherwise permitted. The rezoning quickly cleared the rest of the public review process.

Architect and Alloy co-founder Jared Della Valle led the design of the towers but brought in Architectural Research Office (ARO) to design the school building, having previously collaborated with the firm on a single-family house for Syracuse University’s Near Westside green-home initiative. “We’re good at making complex things not seem complex,” said Stephen Cassell, an ARO principal and the lead designer for the project.

Thanks @cliff.pearson2018 @stephen_cassell @elizabethkubany @jamesewingphoto
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We saw it again when liberal billionaire Michael Bloomberg and technofascist billionaire Peter Thiel united against New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. The despicable libel of anti-Semitism waged against him—as against leftists like Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and even Bernie Sanders across the West for decades—have so far failed to frighten the public. Their other libel against Mamdani—that his policies are likely to spur wealth to flee the city—also had no effect. It was cheered. Do they think the population is afraid of disorder in financial markets after the lawlessness, chaos, and naked corruption of the fraud billionaire’s second administration? The murder of billionaire class is now the secret wish of the broadest number of people. They are used to the revolting smell of raw sewage in the streets of Washington and New York.

The billionaire class also foisted on the general public the vacuous, pulchritudinous center-right presidential campaign of Kamala Harris, whose government, through their influence, promised to change nothing. She would have continued flowing untold billions of dollars of weapons to a ruthless genocidal war of vengeance in the Mediterranean, along with an endless supply of arms to a frozen war in Europe—but would have done nothing to prevent an even larger genocide in northeast Africa. Even this didn’t satisfy their bloodlust. They wanted more. They wanted a rapacious billionaire like themselves. As the podcaster Van Lathan Jr. @vanlathan recently stated blankly, after watching the current government viciously attack every Black institution, “I’m never voting for someone nice again. I want a killer.”

Full text link in profile and at szacks.substack.com
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In Kusch’s framing, the revelatory moment of social transformation is a nauseating stench. It is the French Revolution, in which the city’s population barricades the streets, frees the state’s prisoners, executes the aristocrats, cuts off the king’s head, overthrows the monarchy. Urban populations rising up, rioting, overtaking power—like some recent residents of Washington D.C. reacting to extrajudicial troops on their streets—were the French Revolution’s revolting solution to the problem of the aristocracy. The death of the king was not a crime but an act of faith. What was their faith? Like those January 6th rioters who ransacked the capital and murdered a police officer, it was faith that the new order would legitimize their destruction, give it credibility, not only forgive them but convert it into a cause for celebration.
We see this revelatory moment in the popular response to the assassination of the United Health Care executive Brian Thomson. No one dares say the same is true of the recent murder of several employees of the investment company Blackstone, with its trillion dollars in assets. There were, perhaps, innocents. No news networks explained the expropriation of wealth from the average person that the financial markets entail: the insistence that essential goods and services always increase in price, squeeze labor, and threaten public health, lest their profits and stock price sink. We see this revelation in the unspoken reactions of the people after the fake attempted assassination of candidate Trump, which more than half the population secretly hoped had been real and successful.
This is due, probably, to the state of grotesque subjugation the population has experienced in recent years, after a series of elections in which the billionaire class, without embarrassment or apology, sought nothing less than to control and rule the population against its will.They have continually forced their pulchritude on an unwilling public. We saw tech oligarchs line up on stage behind our grotesque subjugation, donating generously to our repression.
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The Argentinian anthropologist Rodolfo Kusch, in his 1962 book América Profunda, used what he called the “stink of America” as a metaphor to describe his reaction to a chaotic scene in Cusco, Pero, as a newcomer approaching the church of Santa Ana. Surrounding him were an assortment of food carts, street venders, beggars, howling babies, and dancing drunks, who regarded him with a cold and distant glare as he arrived after a long and arduous pilgrimage. Inside the church, everything was neat and clean: “pulchritudinous” in his jargon.
The opposition between stench and orderliness, according to Kusch’s theory, goes to the essence of the relationship between “us,” the newcomers, and “America,” defined as the unclean masses across the Americas that preceded the arrival of the white man, more or less. It is also the tourist, the so-called digital nomad, the post-suburban migrant to the city. From the moment we set foot there, the newcomers want to clean things up, install public bathrooms, wash the dirty face of America, imprison the offenders, pass common-sense gun regulations, maybe. “The first solution to the problems of America always point toward remediating the dirtiness and implanting neatness,” he wrote.

Full text at szacks.substack.com