All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
somewhat horrified myself, having seen the work of my own students at Columbia vandalized by someone who disagreed with my purportedly wild approach—an outrage. Confronted by the dean, Van Eyck ceased his trashing and, when asked how he could do such a thing, delivered the memorable line: “Democracy means no freedom for fascism.”
Baldly stated, but telling. Van Eyck was testing the line between free expression and what he saw as architectural hate speech, one of the primary negotiations of a democratic polity. Architecture can never be a purely private event, and unpacking the elasticity of public space and its ability to stimulate, accommodate, or suppress diverse (and unpredicted) forms of individual and collective expression has underlain much of my work, both written and drawn. Make no mistake: there is a crisis in the public realm and its grossest manifestations range from car bombs in Kabul to CCTV cameras in London, from defensive “street furniture” in Manhattan to the rampant privatization of everything. No matter how you slice it, a shopping mall will never be a public square, nor men with guns the mark of the open city. The focus of my project—whether via critique or proposal—has been on the ways in which such issues find their meaning in form . . . and forms of redress.
The essays in this book are, in large part, shaped by a series of American disasters, each of which has caused a special crisis for spatial liberation. This anthology takes up where my last one left off, late in 2000. In November of that year, George W. Bush was elected to the US presidency. Less than a year after that, the 9/11 attacks took place. Then the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, laying bare the egregious divisions of race and class that had only deepened under the rule of Bush and his corporatist wantons, and throwing into relief the real ramifications of the swelling debate over climate change. That in the midst of these nightmares the formal side of architecture continued to enjoy a remarkable efflorescence is not exactly paradoxical––periods of great accumulation from the Pharaohs to the Medici to the sheiks of the Emirates to the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street will beget monuments––but it begged the question that has perplexed me from the start of my career: how to simultaneously value artistic expression largely directed to the privileged and to rail against a world going to hell in a hand-basket because of a crisis in equity.
There is no simple formulation for this, and I apologize if my practices can seem a skosh schizophrenic: I’ve denounced the perquisites of big money in print while simultaneously designing a fancy hotel in the office. In exculpation, I can only beat my breast and suggest that there’s a certain Peter/Paul strategy of compensatory practice. Even my studio is now physically divided in two with its for-profit (I wish!) and its non-profit sides. My own room straddles the demising wall designed for the IRS and, as the for-profit side pays for it all, the arrangement is the spatial signifier of donated time. Looking over the writing in this and previous volumes, though, I can see that the texts—unlike the 50/50 implication of the virtual division of my office—are strongly weighted to the social side. For that matter, so is the designing, particularly in a long specialization in urbanism, work at a scale that can genuinely be judged for its public arrangements and effects.
In fact, scale and organizational complexity are crucial to a distinction between architecture as an effect and as a producer of effects, whether social, political, environmental or aesthetic. The sumptuary architectures of the Republican decades—from McMansions to museums—can surely be read as effects of a commercialized culture, of seductive (and deceptive) interest rates, of an increased inurement to inequality and planetary peril. This must be decried. The problem, though, in dealing with an art form that is defined by the fact of its necessarily extra-artistic content and behavior is always in testing the implications of the differing—and sometimes competing—claims on it. No work of architecture can presently be judged without considering its impact on the “natural” environment. Nor should any work be exempted from consideration of its styles of collaboration in securing the common space of exchange among people and publics. But we must never criminalize the pursuit of the beautiful, nor depend on the simple vulgarity of arguments that the artistic superstructure is the deterministic outcome of some economic or political base. The work in this volume is informed by the fact, however nuanced or indirect, of a connection.
If there’s an area of conflict in writing about architectural projects that represent enormous expenditure on luxury objects, the necessity of doing so springs from a few motives. One is that a beautiful and pleasurable architectural experience always inspires, provided its use isn’t an overwhelming affront. Another is to hold the feet of my brother and sister architects to the fire for the insensitivity of their egregious money-grubbing and for the vapid, end-of-history (or hermetically arcane) explanations that seek to naturalize such practices as the only alternative. Still another has been to insist that the discourse of architectural and urban effects must be understood in terms of its invariable relevance to our planetary environmental meltdown. Building is responsible for nearly half of the carbon emissions that are wreaking such planetary havoc, and the differential rates of consumption—of materials, of energy, of space, clean air, labor, capital—embodied in construction make the crisis clear. A much rehearsed but telling example is the simple fact that were everyone in the world to consume at the American rate, the surface area of two additional planets would be required to supply all the stuff. We are up against real limits, and architecture can be decisive. Finally, I have never hesitated to call architects on doing work that’s truly inimical to justice, whether that work is the instrument of the displacement of living communities, window dressing for repressive regimes or toxic ideologies, the medium of imprisonment and surveillance, or the distributor of ill-gotten gains. And, by extension, I’ve been intolerant of the criticism and theorizing that abets all of this.
The period from which these pieces come also saw the deaths of two individuals of special importance to me, a pair who represent the antinomies of contemporary architecture in stark relief. The first of these was Philip Johnson, against whom I have directed a bushel of diatribes—including a few in this volume. Johnson 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, to his rich boy’s casualness with privilege, to his promiscuously banal sense of style, his fey irony, his upper-crust superficiality and the pack of sycophants who really should have known better but continued to allow themselves to be bought on the cheap. Basta! Good riddance! Shut the door!
The truly deep loss was Jane Jacobs. Jacobs redirected the tone of the urban question in America away from both blithe suburbanism and the savage “renewal” by demolition of urban neighborhoods and centers. She was the compleat urbanist, operating as a thinker, a polemicist and an activist. That I have long lived in the same neighborhood where Jacobs formulated her most trenchant and specific analyses of urbanity and won her most enduring victories “on the ground” is no coincidence. We all construct our quotidian utopias, and Greenwich Village—and New York City—have been a big part of mine from a tender age. Jane Jacobs was a poet of effects, a brilliant and engaged observer of the intercourse of space and the scope of human action and prospect. She was an economist in the hoariest sense, a student of the relational systems and structures that beget exchange. The seamlessness of the connection between her economism and her urbanism is a model of analysis and engagement, one that generated her profoundly ecological view of cities.
Jacobs inspires for the directness of her style, the restlessness of her curiosity, her rejection of disciplinary compartments, and for keeping up the fight to the very end. She is also an avatar of the sixties, a formative decade for me (I am often bashed nowadays as an unreconstructed fossil of the era), and a reminder that the delirium of those days stood on the shoulders of revelatory critique—the key texts were produced not by us whelps but by our elders during a special half-decade of wonders. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) was published in a heroic context in America, one that includes Lewis Mumford’s The City in History (1961), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963), Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963), Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) among many others. This constellation of work greeted me when I got to college and continues to define the core of my critical concerns. To these works of constructive intellectual insubordination were shortly added the more bodily vectors of sex,