Remembering Michael Sorkin
The Gotham Center was immensely saddened to learn of Michael Sorkin’s passing on Thursday, March 26th, due to COVID-19.
As Dezeen wrote yesterday, news of his death “triggered shock and an outpouring of warm tributes from architects, critics and writers around the world.”
Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, still “thunderstruck” at the news, asked that we share his comments online:
“I am heartbroken. This is a great loss. He was so many things. He was a supremely gifted, astute and acerbic writer. He wrote with moral force about big ideas and about the granular experience of life at the level of the street. He was a teacher, a pioneering publisher of urban treatises and architectural provocations, an architect of grand ambition, a secret softie — and one of those figures who, for decades, made his share of enemies, championed big dreams and helped make New York New York.”
We agree.
Sorkin was “one of the most distinctive voices for social justice and sustainability in the design of the urban environment,” as Cathleen McGuigin eulogized in Architectural Record. The author of numerous books, and editor of yet more, he was a regular contributor in the world of print, still remembered by many for his arch, punchy column in The Village Voice, where he first launched his career in the 1980s and developed his wonderful style. He remained a principal of the architectural firm he created in those years as well, now a “global design practice devoted to both practical and theoretical projects at all scales” (whose recent projects include an award-winning masterplan for a new city of 300,000 and an environmental research park in Wuhan, China). And he was the founder of the Terreform Center for Advanced Urban Research, as well as the recipient of national awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and the American Institute of Architects.
But he was an educator, too — a proud member of CUNY’s urbanist community, who, in between visiting positions at Cooper Union, Harvard and Columbia, served, and for many years directed, City College’s graduate urban design program. For that reason, and because of his singular devotion to New York City and the urban idea, against the powerful headwinds of the nation’s anti-urban tradition, we have gathered tributes from some of his colleagues, to salute our friend and comrade and teacher.
Tributes
I saw Michael Sorkin about two weeks ago at the Spitzer School of Architecture. I didn’t know that this committee meeting would be the last time that we would see each other, speak with one another, and work together. Whoever does?
We sat together, not giving much thought to social distancing — no one was sick, no one was coughing, no one had a fever — and took care of the matters at hand. It was the ninth of March. The pandemic had started to stir in New York City, it was starting to wreak havoc, but it had not yet derailed the architecture school, the college, and the city that Michael loved. Looking back, I’ve asked myself was there any premonition in the air of the tragedy to come? Michael and I exchanged a few words, then a poignant glance, about an elderly colleague who had passed away weeks before. Both saddened and annoyed, he mentioned that he was forced to postpone a trip that he planned to take with Joan, his wife, to celebrate their lives together. He looked at me and asked, when would they be able to travel again? And where? Not answerable then, not now either.
My heart goes out to Joan Copjec and other members of Michael’s family. I can’t begin to imagine their grief and sorrow. I’ve lost a friend and a colleague whom I knew and admired for years, someone I first met when I was in architecture school. Over the many years since, I worked with him, wrote for him, taught with him, debated him, disagreed with him, read him, and most of all learned from him. He was an architect, a writer, and a thinker who pushed us to be better at what we do; a lover of cities and city life. He was also an adamant defender of public education, who, like his beloved friend and mentor, the late Marshall Berman, stayed put at City College in the face of temptations by richer universities, and built our great architecture school. I’m profoundly sad that we are bereft of his voice and his person; a man so vital, so smart, so witty, so caring.
But I’m also angry — at the government that failed to protect him, and us — a government that has for so long failed to act in the interest of all its citizens. Maybe it’s too soon to say this, but I have a hunch that Michael would approve. His death should not have happened. In 1915, the night before Joe Hill, the famous laborer, songwriter, and Industrial Workers of the World union organizer, faced a firing squad, on a trumped-up charge of murder, he wrote Bill Haywood, president of the IWW. This is what he said: “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.”
To Michael, in solidarity forever.
Marta Gutman, Professor of Art History and Earth and Environmental Sciences, The Graduate Center, CUNY,
& Professor of Architecture (History and Theory), City College of New York, CUNY
Michael was a gutsy, gifted essayist and critic. In a prodigious output of hundreds of books, chapters, articles, columns, projects, and lectures he captivated readers, audiences, and design juries with poetic prose, memorable turns of phrase, erudite provocations, and arresting drawings and graphics.
I am among the many who can unequivocally state that Michael is the reason we came to City College. In my case, first as a student in the Graduate Urban Design Program he directed for twenty years, then for the past dozen years as a faculty colleague in the architecture department. (He often ended faculty meetings with an impromptu summary in doggerel, a main attraction to attendance.) He mentored hundreds of students from across the globe — “comrades” who comprise a diaspora of creative Sorkinite-urbanists, reconnecting now on remote platforms in profound sorrow and shock to mourn his untimely passing.
We remember his irreverent columns in The Village Voice, and his exposing of “raffish old ex-Fascist Philip Johnson” in Spy (“Where was Philip?” Oct., 1988). The 1992 edited collection Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, with highly influential contributions from Margaret Crawford, Neil Smith, Christine Boyer and others was an inspiration. In 2014, revisiting his subtitle and his Harvard Design Magazine piece on “The End(s) of Urban Design,” Nandini Bagchee and I organized conference sessions on “The New Global City and the End(s) of Public Space.” Michael’s concerns had also gyrated out from his New York City base (well documented in the “love-book” Twenty Minutes in Manhattan), extended to a vast network of places and people across all continents.
Of course, Michael was himself a restless globe trotter. With his City College urban design students, he traveled anywhere dynamic change and conflicts brewed that might yield provocative “tasty” design: among them Belfast, Hanoi, Habana, and, yes, Wuhan.
Michael’s themes are prescient. Some now shape the nightmare of daily life lived subject to drastic protocols for containing the viral contagion that felled him. Others themes will guide us in the future, providing inspiration and example for what we who call ourselves urbanists will do next.
The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at CCNY is collecting remembrances on our website. Please visit and share.
June Williamson, Department Chairperson and Associate Professor
The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, The City College of New York
Michael Sorkin was both the quintessential New Yorker and a citizen of the world. Like Jane Jacobs, another gifted writer and chronicler of street life in Greenwich Village, Michael was born elsewhere but passionately loved the city’s cacophony of voices and accents — and just as passionately railed against senseless bureaucrats, venal real estate developers and craven politicians who would destroy the little democracies that are rooted in place.
Michael was a quick thinker and a brilliant writer. He was also a generous teacher, colleague, and friend. After 9/11, when I asked him to join me in gathering like-minded New York urbanists to write something to help sort out our feelings and thoughts about the city in the world, he immediately agreed. Our collective book grieved and critiqued and wound up expressing Michael’s view that energizing knowledge, writing, and the willingness to criticize power is the only way to survive hard times. It is also, my friend, the way you looked toward the future.
Sharon Zukin, Professor Emerita of Sociology
Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY
Many of us have enjoyed Michael’s often acerbic and always insightful thoughts about urban life and design in our era. Fewer might know, however, that Michael worked tirelessly to pool urban-related course offerings across CUNY to inform his and other students about what we do, often metaphorically shaking his head that CUNY should have so many wonderful strengths yet do such a poor job making sure the sum was as great as the individual parts. He tirelessly brought us in contact with each other and in so doing sowed seeds that will flower for many years to come.
John H. Mollenkopf, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology
& Director of the Center for Urban Research
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Michael Sorkin was a true original. He worked at City College when he had other options. He envisioned cities that were genuinely imaginative, even to the point of lacking realism. And he actually affected urban design in real places. I especially want to salute his memory with what was probably one of his minor accomplishments, the Lewis Mumford Memorial Lectures. He picked great people who were spot-on relevant to the moment. The dinner afterwards was often the one time a year I saw my urbanist colleagues and friends. Once I shared a cab with David Byrne, a personal thrill. And the lecture by Marshall Berman shortly before his death, that was like a prayer for us all.
Susan Saegert, Professor of Environmental Psychology and Geography
The Graduate Center CUNY
Working with Michael stretched your mind and resolve. He knew what was coming and wrote fearlessly about the ways that the built environment resulting from illiberal politics is reshaping our world. In fact Michael’s writings illuminated illiberalism long before these terms had entered our academic lexicon. If you have not had time to read his book Starting from Zero, or his essay in Indefensible Space, on what should be done after 9/11, now would be the moment. He envisioned a socially just New York City emerging from the destruction and death of that day. He was so frustrated with our return to business as usual. During these difficult days, and with the added burden of the loss of our gifted and committed colleague, I suggest we read his explorations of a better future to help us fight for what he imagined.
Setha Low, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Anthropology
The Graduate Center, CUNY
As I told his beloved wife Joan, Michael lit up my life, and the lives of countless others; the world seems a bit darker today."
Mike Wallace, Distinguished Professor of History
John Jay College and The Graduate Center, CUNY