All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin

      Dedication

      To my students

      Contents

       Cover

       Title

      Dedication

      Preface

      Introduction

      1 The Second-Greatest Generation

      2 Herb’s Content

      3 Notes on a Tennessee Town

      4 After the Fall

      5 What Remains

      6 First Response

      7 The Center Cannot Hold

      8 Six Months

      9 Thinking Inside the Box

      10 The Dimensions of Aura

      11 The World Peace Dome

      12 The Lotus

      13 Security

      14 A Brief for Reconstruction

      15 Riff on Rem

      16 Herbert’s List

      17 Splitsville, USA: Why the Practice and Teaching of Urban Design Is Coming Apart

      18 Urbanism Is Politics

      19 On SITE

      20 Who Decides?

      21 No Island Is an Island

      22 Obstructed Vision

      23 Remembering Doug Michels

      24 The Avant-Garde in Time of War

      25 And Then There Were Two

      26 Density Noodle

      27 Caveat Competitor

      28 (S)Truth and Consequences

      29 Entering the Building

      30 Urban Warfare: A Tour of the Battlefield

      31 Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Cars, Dolphins, and Architecture

      32 Displacement

      33 Crippled in the City

      34 The Limits of Tolerance

      35 When Good Architects Design Bad Buildings

      36 Advice to Critics

      37 Liberty Square

      38 Bush in Space

      39 Architecture and Revolution

      40 What Can You Say About The Pritzker?

      41 A Trip to Tijuana

      42 Seven Chairs

      43 A Letter to Bob

      44 Into the Woods

      45 Cardinal Points

      46 My Last Philippic

      47 Gulf States

      48 People Who Live in Urban Glass Houses

      49 Ten Better Places for a Football Stadium

      50 Finding a Dramatic Home for a Political Football

      51 The Great Mall of New York

      52 The Bounding Mayne

      53 Drowning in the Gulf Again

      54 Sincerely, Jane Jacobs

      55 Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?

      56 Stuyvesant Town

      57 How I Invented Asia

      58 Everybody’s a Critic!

      59 Go Down Moses!

      60 The Jungle Urban: Welcome to Petropolis

      61 Trumped Again

      62 Asian Alterity: What’s the Diference?

      63 The End(s) of Urban Design

      64 Big Brother Is Charging You

      65 West Side Story

      66 An Architectural Tourist on Omotesando

      67 Learning from the Hutong of Beijing and Lilong of Shanghai

      68 Covering the Territory: Three Films by Amos Gitai

      69 Bucky and Me

      70 Three Freedoms

      71 The Plot against Architecture

      72 A Letter to President Obama

      73 A Cut through the City

      74 Trouble in Paradise

      75 Discipline and Punish

      76 Eutopia Now!

      Acknowledgments

      Copyright

      Books by Michael Sorkin

      Preface

      The majority of the pieces in this collection were first published in Architectural Record magazine and I’d like to thank Robert Ivy and Clifford Pearson for offering me a place to say pretty much what I chose for so many years. A couple of the longer essays appeared in the Harvard Design Magazine and I’m indebted to William Saunders for his staunch support and encouragement. Many of the 9/11-related pieces in this volume were collected in Starting from Zero and I’d like to give a shout out to the great Dave McBride, formerly of Routledge, who saw that volume through. (I did debate leaving these pieces out but the volume seemed wrong without them, and so I’ve included a substantial selection, some trimmed, others merged to eliminate repetition and breathless deadline lapses. Forbearance please for remaining auto-cannibalization, self-plagarism and the overworking of many words and phrases, including “Manichean,” “difference,” “effects,” “public-private partnerships,” and “zillions.”) Thanks too to Tom Penn for his comradely midwifery and to Verso for a third vote of confidence in this fellow traveler. Special thanks to Trudy Giordano, Maia Peck, and Zoë Blackler for their help in organizing the manuscript and tracking down many a misplaced file.

      The period covered in this volume coincides with my directorship of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York, and I express my gratitude to my dear friend Dean George Ranalli for giving me an open space in which to work (not to mention tenure and health insurance) and for helping to gather a congenial and dedicated group of colleagues to further the mission of this extraordinary institution. While the Trots and the Stalinoids may no longer throw spitballs from their separate tables at the cafeteria, CCNY continues its grand tradition of progressive tolerance and its goal of making higher education available to all. I do love the thrill each year of welcoming students from across the planet to share the adventure of imagining happy, just, and sustainable futures for our cities. I dedicate this volume to them.

      Introduction

      About twenty years ago—at the height of the historicist belch of architectural PoMo—I taught a studio at the University of Pennsylvania. One day, as I strolled into the building fresh from the train, I came upon an exhibition of drawings of student projects all done in the then fashionably phony-baloney classical style (just following the orders), rendered in dispiriting watercolor washes and brown ink. Rounding a corner, I came upon the great Aldo van Eyck—a hero from my own student days—who was also teaching at the school that semester. He was in the process of ripping the drawings