Dezeen: "Fierce and brilliant architect Michael Sorkin dies of coronavirus

Eleanor Gibson, March 27 2020

Tributes have poured in for architect and critic Michael Sorkin, who has died aged 71 of complications caused by Covid-19.

Based in New York, Sorkin headed architecture firm Michael Sorkin Studio and was president of non-profit research group Terreform.

His death triggered shock and an outpouring of warm tributes from architects, critics and writers around the world.

"He was a supremely gifted, astute and acerbic writer"

"I am heartbroken. This is a great loss," tweeted New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman. "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."

"Whether or not one agreed with Michael Sorkin didn't matter in the end," added Chicago Tribune critic Blair Kamin. "He was a great activist critic – fearless, unafraid to challenge received wisdom or powerful figures, and, because of his wit and insight, a pleasure to read."

"The architecture world has lost a brilliant mind," said Harriet Harriss, dean of New York's Pratt Institute School of Architecture.

Financial Times architecture correspondent Edwin Heathcote described Sorkin as a "fierce and brilliant critic, perhaps the best".

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Vanessa Keith at Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales Exhibition

As part of a parallel program accompanying the exhibition Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales, A Children’s Story, A Horror Story, taking place on the 15th of February 5 PM at Matadero Madrid, is a Synesthetic Story structured in three main parts, a group of international participants—architects, artists and theo-rists— from diverse context experiences, will tell three stories. From the climate crisis to property speculation, the present seems to lead us toward a future that leaves no room for a dignified life: the future is a horror story, especially that of the city. In response to stories about future terror that can seem paralysing, we aim to invoke speculation as a hopeful practice, an exercise in resistance that calls upon the need to identify future alternatives to resist what the future is said to hold.

Vanessa Keith is a registered architect and the Principal of Studioteka, which she founded in 2003. Based in New York city, StudioTEKA is a boutique firm that engages in both built and research based design work. She is the author of the UR Book 2100: A Dystopian Utopia.

Jordan H. Carver and Mark Wasiuta in conversation with Nina Valerie Kolowratnik at e-flux

Trevor Paglen, National Reconnaissance Office Ground Station (ADF-SW) Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico; Distance ~16 Miles, 2012. C-print, 37.5 x 48.6 in. Courtesy of the artist; Metro Pictures, New York; and Altman Siegel, San Francisco. © Trevor Paglen

On Wednesday, February 5, e-flux hosted an event in celebration of of Nina Valerie Kolowratnik's The Language of Secret Proof: Indigenous Truth and Representation. Jordan H. Carver, author of Spaces of Disappearance, and Mark Wasiuta, co-director of the CCCP program at Columbia GSAPP, were in conversation with Kolowratnik.

In The Language of Secret Proof, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik challenges the conditions under which Indigenous rights to protect and regain traditional lands are currently negotiated in United States legal frameworks.