Michael Sorkin is an American architect, a professor of architecture at City College in New York and easily one of the best architecture critics around. His collection of Village Voice columns, Exquisite Corpse (a title taken from the surrealists), which was published in 1991, confirmed Robert Hughes’ opinion that “he is unique in America — brave, principled, highly informed and fiercely funny.”
With All Over the Map, a collection of articles from the Architectural Record, Sorkin continues to focus on New York but, as ever, his critical thinking has wider implications. His pieces often start with an arresting, polemical opening (“All architecture is political”), to be followed by a tangential wander around a topic before a more focused two-paragraph summation and an equally strong final sentence (“The only answer to terror is an excess of democracy,” “Good cities are a bulwark”).
The book begins in 2001 with the destruction of the World Trade Center and ends with his own architectural manifesto — one that owes a great debt to Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. He argues for sustainable, bounded, polycentric and diverse cities, and is most interested, as someone who has long specialized in city planning, on “work at a scale that can genuinely be judged for its public arrangements and effects” rather than on individual buildings.
Sorkin argues convincingly that the Ground Zero site in Lower Manhattan should be open, public space that encourages “peaceable assembly” as its most important activity — something in short supply there.
He rails against Larry Silverstein, the “philistine leaseholder,” and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. When Daniel Libeskind, who is now master-planning the site, first produced his design for the so-called Freedom Tower, Sorkin wrote that “with its bellicose iconography of strength, its giganticism, and its emphasis on heroism — [it] seems to commemorate victory.” The One World Trade Center tower, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s skyscraper, is due to open in 2013: Sorkin’s criticism still pertains.
He is undistracted by the false debate about which was the best design in the Ground Zero competition, questioning the very idea that there must be buildings to replace those lost and looking at the wider context of the ecology of Lower Manhattan and beyond. “We do not hallow this ground simply by filling it with buildings,” he writes. It is “disaster triumphalised,” and he asks “why must the world’s tallest office building be built on this hallowed ground?”
He dismisses Libeskind’s “treacly recitations of his immigrant sagas” and is disgusted by a fashion piece that compares the eyewear of the design competition finalists. “Never was vision so conflated with sight or sore eyes,” he writes scathingly.
All Over the Map seeks to redress what Sorkin calls the “crisis in the public realm” from “car bombs in Kabul to CCTV cameras in London, from defensive ‘street furniture’ in Manhattan to the rampant privatization of everything” and especially urban sprawl. I’m not so sure that sprawl is, as he claims, the US’ special contribution to urbanism, but it’s easy to agree with his ringing conclusion: “Sprawl is unsustainable. Cities are the cure.”
Sorkin doesn’t pull punches — he writes a devastating obituary of architect Philip Johnson, a bete noire, whose body of work is merely “mediocre” and who was “clarifyingly emblematic of everything revolting about architectural culture, from his long love of the Nazis and his unspeakable anti-Semitism,
to his club-house conduct of architectural patronage ... his fey irony, his upper-crust superficiality ... Basta! Good riddance!”
He laments the decline in the standards of the architect Rem Koolhaas, demonstrated especially in his Prada buildings — how “Rem becomes RemCopyright,” as he puts it. Koolhaas’ non-committal view of the city, he argues, is often nothing more than “a series of laminations that serve its shopping subjects by smoothing the flow of traffic.” (Though perhaps Sorkin shouldn’t shout too loudly about these capitulations to the market — his own studio’s Seven Star Hotel project in Tianjin, China, appears little different.)
Sorkin repeatedly urges us not to be blinded by form. “Halliburton headquarters (or Saddam’s palazzi) may be gorgeous,” he writes, “but that isn’t exactly the point.” As he says in a chapter titled Advice to Critics, “Style ... often conceals more than it expresses.” His most important admonition, however, is never to be “a conduit for someone else’s delusions” — something no one could ever accuse him of being.
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