Zachary Angles is an architectural designer and educator with research interests located at the intersections between architecture, fiction, and world-building. In other words, he researches how world-building can be used as scenario-planning to mitigate risk, design proactively, and identify and address externalities of the built world. His thesis, “Narrative Tactics for Making Other Worlds Possible,” explores how architectural design can use world-building to address societal and ecologic externalities in our uncertain times of resource scarcity and climatic crisis.
He edited thresholds 45: MYTH, published by the MIT Press in 2017, which brought together disciplinary voices to explore how architecture makes myth and myth makes architecture. Continuing his interest in discourse and education, he founded a research group, The Storytelling Space Group, which has conducted workshops and organized symposia on world-building around the globe. He has worked for award-winning offices on architectural, industrial and graphic design, and urban analysis on projects based around the globe. He has taught workshops at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, the University of Stuttgart, and the Adolfo Ibáñez University's Design Lab.