n+1: Precise and Prescient, On Michael Sorkin

by Thomas de Monchaux and Mark Krotov

Michael Sorkin Studio, Atlanta City Center Proposal, 1986

ARE COVID-19 OBITUARIES all we’re going to be writing and publishing for the next few months? To my shame I’ve never seen a Terrence McNally play, have never listened to Manu Dibango or Aurlus Mabele, don’t think I’ve ever read Maurice Berger. Which means that Michael Sorkin, who died on Thursday, is, for me, the pandemic’s first celebrity victim, to the extent that an architecture critic can be a celebrity. He was 71.

I would like to avoid imagining Sorkin’s final moments in—I presume—a chaotic, overcrowded New York hospital, but in a Covid-19 obituary there is no peaceful end to conjure, no comforting, mitigating cliché. This is not a moment to take peaceful stock of a life lived to the fullest.

Sorkin died needlessly, at the hands of a monstrous President he diagnosed better than most back in the summer of 2016, when too many of us dismissed analogy as overstatement. Sorkin began writing for the Village Voice in the late ’70s, his office was up the street from Trump SoHo, and his beat was architecture, money, power, fascism. Of course he understood. And yet: “it isn’t the architecture that makes the man dangerous.” Better, always better, to avoid the metaphor and state things plainly:

An ironic staple of current cocktail chatter: Was it like this in Berlin in 1932? That fool will never become chancellor. The bombast, the racism, the mustache—impossible. Of course, the comparison goes too far, doesn’t it? Demonizing Muslims is very different from demonizing Jews. And the plan is to keep them out, not throw them out, right? It’s the 11 million Mexicans we actually want to deport, and they’re all criminals. And we’re going to build great things: walls as wide as a country and as long as the autobahn. That sound we hear is the glass ceiling shattering, not Kristallnacht.

Isn’t it?

That was how that column ended…..

REVIEW OF: "THE HELSINKI EFFECT: PUBLIC ALTERNATIVES TO THE GUGGENHEIM MODEL OF CULTURE-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT"

By Annette Koh

The Guggenheim Effect is an urbanist fairy tale about how a starchitect-designed museum transformed a sleepy backwater into a celebrated global destination. In this story, architect Frank Gehry’s undulating design for Bilbao’s Guggenheim museum jolted Bilbao out of post-industrial doldrums by garnering international acclaim and drawing an influx of tourists and investment.

The Helsinki Effect: Public Alternatives to the Guggenheim Model of Culture-Driven Development punctures the prevailing mythology through a case study of the failed 2011 proposal for a Guggenheim branch in Helsinki, Finland. Edited by Finnish artist Terike Haapoja, American cultural studies scholar Andrew Ross, and the much-missed Michael Sorkin, the book is an accessible antidote for all those entranced by fantasies of a “world-class” museum catalyzing urban revitalization. Divided into an essay section and a design proposal section, the book fuses together critique with practice to answer the “clear need for alternatives to… blockbuster design.” [1]

The eight contributors to Part One launch a far-ranging interdisciplinary critique of the multi-scalar origins, logics and processes of exploitation embedded within the mega-museum franchise. Curator Juhani Pallasma begins with the key premises and problematics of the proposed Helsinki Guggenheim, with attention to its discursive, aesthetic aspects. The essays include reflections by collaborators from Checkpoint Helsinki arts coalition and the New York City-based G.U.L.F. collective – founded to challenge worker abuse in the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim construction.

The second half of The Helsinki Effect features a kaleidoscopic set of creative possibilities generated by the Next Helsinki counter-competition organized in 2014 and 2015 by several of the book’s contributors. The compiled proposals vary wildly in approach, but all seek to reinterpret the museum as an institution and redefine culture within urban space…

Michael Sorkin (1948 — 2020)

Dearest Comrades,

Our dear leader Michael Sorkin, the prolific writer, urbanist and architect, passed away on March 26, 2020, from coronavirus. 

The Michael Sorkin family, at Terreform, Michael Sorkin Studio, and Urban Research, has been overwhelmed by the response to the news of Michael's passing. 

Michael has given us all much work to get on with. You can be reassured that Michael's presence will continue to be all over the map!

Michael was the President of Terreform that he founded in 2005. As with all Michael's work, Terreform was created to further the mission of more equitable, sustainable, and beautiful cities for our urbanizing planet. All of Terreform's multiple books are published by its imprint Urban Research, where Michael served as Editor-in-Chief. 

In its fifteen years of existence, Terreform has developed a number of proposals for a more just and beautiful New York. Terreform’s beginnings are rooted in the project New York City (Steady) State that sought to answer the question of how can we get the ecological footprint of the city to be equivalent to that of its political boundary? Homegrown is the first volume of New York (Steady) State and will be published in the near future. Outside of New York, Terreform initiated a proposal to ensure that the Obama Library serves as a catalyst for urban development of the South Side of Chicago as a whole. 

Terreform, as with Michael himself, has research projects that far exceed the  boundaries of the United States.  Our first publication this year was to be Open Gaza, a project that reflected Michael's long-standing commitment to the Palestine struggle for social and spatial justice. Other upcoming book projects include: Nanjing Charter, Between Catastrophe and Revolution: Essays in Honor of Mike Davis, Gregory Ain: Low-Cost Modern Housing and the Construction of a Social Landscape, Syria Unsettled and Stupid Cities. 

Terreform, New York City, March 26, 2020.

Please share your memories of Michael below in the comments or on our facebook page.

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Michael left us all with a lot of work to do at Terreform!

For us to be able to carry on with the work of the Terreform legacy and mission, please consider a tax-deductible donation.

Projects include Michael's Magnum Opus New York City (Steady) State and its first volume Home Grown; Open Gaza; Stupid Cities; South Side Chicago... and many more!

D O N A T E

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