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NY Times, March 30, 2020
Michael Sorkin, 71, Dies; Saw Architecture as a Vehicle for Change
By Joseph Giovannini
Michael Sorkin, one of architecture’s most outspoken public
intellectuals, a polymath whose prodigious output of essays, lectures
and designs, all promoting social justice, established him as the
political conscience in the field, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71.
In lectures and in years of teaching, Mr. Sorkin inspired audiences and
students to use architecture to change lives, resist the status quo and
help achieve social equity. His motivational writings and projects
helped reset the field’s moral compass.
With degrees from the University of Chicago and Columbia University, and
a master’s in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, he moved in 1973 from Cambridge to New York, a city he said
he adored for its opera and toasted bagels. It remained his home for the
rest of his life.
He and his wife, a professor of film theory at Brown University, spent
decades in a modest, rent-controlled, two-bedroom floor-through
apartment on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, from which he commuted
daily on foot to his studio in TriBeCa. He based one of his dozen books,
“Twenty Minutes in Manhattan” (2009), on his pedestrian odyssey.
His writings ranged in scope from urban theory to the Israeli border
wall to issues of sustainability. He specialized in compressing biting
wit and intellectual scope in irresistible sentences that buoyed serious
arguments.
His designs, mostly unbuilt statements of theory, were equally
wide-ranging: a small-lot apartment competition in New York, a master
plan for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, vast urban planning
schemes for competitions in China. He laced his urban proposals with
green zones and designed lighthearted zoomorphic buildings, like a
seaside hotel shaped like a jellyfish drifting in the current.
A natural radical who saw architecture through a political and social
lens, Mr. Sorkin maintained an outsider’s critical perspective even as
he entered the establishment as head of his own architecture firm and as
director of the graduate urban design program at the City College of New
York. His practice, writings and academic position gave him a public
platform. At the beginning of his career, he made his reputation by
speaking truth to power; when he achieved a degree of power, he
continued to speak truth, as though still an outsider.
He first established himself as a public figure from 1980 to 1990 at The
Village Voice, where he wrote searing critiques, leavened with humor,
that were often delivered at the expense of people who lived uptown. “He
said what everyone was really thinking but were afraid to say,” said Max
Protetch, whose Max Protetch Gallery specialized in architects’ drawings.
Philip Johnson, long since ensconced as the dean of American
architecture by the time Mr. Sorkin began writing, was a conspicuous
target. He ripped into Johnson’s post-Modernist AT&T Building on Madison
Avenue (1984), designed like a Chippendale highboy, calling it a
tarted-up “Seagram Building with ears.” In the humor magazine Spy, he
outed Johnson as a former Nazi sympathizer, a fact no one at the time
dared whisper.
When he attacked Paul Goldberger, then the architecture critic of The
New York Times, in The Voice, Mr. Goldberger fired back that Mr.
Sorkin’s writing “is to thoughtful criticism what the Ayatollah Khomeini
is to religious tolerance.” The mischievous Mr. Sorkin advertised that
retort as a credential when he used it as a blurb on the back cover of a
volume of collected essays, “Exquisite Corpse: Writings on Buildings”
(1991).
“I thought of Michael as a bomb thrower because his pieces always shook
things up,” said Cathleen McGuigan, editor in chief of Architectural
Record, where Mr. Sorkin was a longtime contributing editor.
Mr. Sorkin was an activist critic with a social agenda. He started his
career identifying abuses of power while facing the headwinds of the
conservative Reagan era. “Politics programs our architecture,” he wrote.
He advocated for housing and green energy rather than prisons and malls,
and for citizens to participate in the design of their own urban
destinies. As architecture’s largest expression, the city shaped how
people led their lives, behaved and therefore thought, and he viewed
urban design as an instrument of enlightened social engineering,
political justice and power sharing. He inveighed against the
privatization of public space.
“Ultimately Michael was a humanist: He believed in building for people,
not the power structure,” said James Wines, founder of Site, a New York
environmental arts firm, adding: “Within the scope of his broad
theories, he focused on how people use street signs, roadways and
infrastructure. He was a complex thinker, and he designed complexity.”
As part of a theoretical project for redesigning the East New York
section of Brooklyn, Mr. Sorkin proposed planting trees in an
intersection to reduce public space devoted to traffic and encourage the
growth of a more agrarian low-density neighborhood. “Michael wasn’t
doing urban planning,” said Andrei Vovk, Mr. Sorkin’s architectural
partner from 1992 to 2001. “He initiated organic patterns.”
If his design approach in East New York was a down-to-earth act of urban
acupuncture, he also started drawing imaginary ideal cities in the 1990s
in which, Mr. Vovk said, “we introduced sustainability and ecology to
foster better lives for us and the planet.”
In 2005, Mr. Sorkin opened the Terreform Center for Advanced Urban
Research, an interdisciplinary nonprofit dedicated to achieving a
socially equitable urbanism. Its flagship project has been investigating
self-sufficiency in New York’s food, waste, energy and transport systems.
China’s explosive growth over the last 20 years gave him the opportunity
to actually build his imaginary cities. “He went to China because they
were building cities from scratch,” Mr. Vovk said. Mr. Sorkin wrote in
Architectural Record, “I am thrilled by several Chinese commissions
we’ve had for urban projects that demand thinking at a scale and a level
of sustainability almost never sought elsewhere in the world.”
Many of his vast urban designs for China placed among the winners of
competitions, but none were built, though Mr. Vovk said their ideas were
adapted by other projects. Typically in these proposals, Mr. Sorkin wove
nature into the fabric of patterns he laid atop patterns. A butterfly
could flutter its way through continuous swaths of green; a squirrel
could make its way between trees without having to cross a street.
Michael David Sorkin was born in Washington on Aug. 2, 1948, to George
and Ruth Sorkin. His father was a scientist, his mother a homemaker. He
attributed the beginnings of his interest in architecture to the fact
that their home was in an architect-designed community.
Focused on the big urban picture, Mr. Sorkin came to see the city as the
source of architecture’s social meaning. He designed not free-standing
object buildings but structures that grew from the city of which they
remained a part. His “House as Garden,” an unbuilt project for a
terraced apartment house in New York, illustrated how the landscaped
city of his urban vision could climb onto a building.
“When he was drawing a building, he was always drawing part of a city,”
Mr. Vovk said, adding, “His initial conceptual drawings were dances of
his hand, the choreography of his mind, like scans between the hand and
thinking.”
In a tribute published on the website of the architecture and design
magazine Dezeen, Geoff Manaugh, remarking on the rarefied sensibility
Mr. Sorkin brought to design, quoted him as saying: “Fish are
symmetrical but only until they wiggle. Our effort is to measure the
space between the fish and the wiggle. This is the study of a lifetime.”
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