Author Archives: Andy Stratton

Some Assembly Required

Michael Sorkin is widely hailed as one of the best architecture critics writing today. Iconoclastic and often controversial, he is a witty, entertaining, yet ultimately serious writer. In this new collection, Sorkin reviews the state of contemporary architecture and surveys the dramatic changes in the urban environment of the past decade. From New York to

Wiggle

Based in New York, Michael Sorkin is one of the most talked-about and controversial architects working today. A critical and polemical (yet humorous) voice in contemporary culture, he is a highly respected and internationally known architect, writer, and lecturer. His previous books contained his critical writings, and he has never published a complete volume on

Exquisite Corpse

‘Exquisite Corpse’ was a game played by the surrealists in which someone drew on a piece of paper, folded it and passed it to the next person to draw on until, finally, the sheet was opened to reveal a calculated yet random composition. In this entertaining and provocative book, Michael Sorkin suggests that cities are

Variations on a Theme Park

America’s cities are being rapidly transformed by a sinister and homogenous design. A new Kind of urbanism–manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space–is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places,

Prototypo n°9

Prototypo is a Lisbon-based, high-profile bilingual magazine, in English and Portuguese, featuring 160 pages in color of the finest and most exciting architectural and artistic output. Responding to the motto of “space-craftsmanship”, Prototypo summons some of the leading figures in cultural discourse to give its readers a multifaceted perspective of recent proceedings in project design.

Generic Specific Continuum

The work of Spanish architect Julio Salcedo is shown in this book as a series of built and speculative projects. Salcedo’s houses – early achievements that stunned both academic and professional circles with their freshness and precocious sophistication – are presented along with unpublished competition proposals for large-scale buildings. The projects in their varying locations,