Spitzer Stars
Michael Sorkin
Professor (2000-2007), Distinguished Professor (2008-2020), Director, Graduate Program in Urban Design (2000-2019)
Biography :
Michael Sorkin (1948-2020), writer, designer, teacher, and public intellectual, transformed the Urban Design program at the Spitzer School of Architecture, steering it toward interdisciplinary inquiry and the creation of equitable, beautiful, and sustainable forms and technologies for the city and urbanity at large. His prodigious output of essays, lectures, and designs, all promoting social justice, established him as the political conscience in the field.
Sorkin, founding principal of Michael Sorkin Studio, also directed the Terreform Center for Advanced Urban Research, an interdisciplinary nonprofit dedicated to achieving socially equitable and sustainable urbanism. Through his criticism, design practice, public service, and teaching, Sorkin showed us that the city is part of larger ecological and social systems that contribute so much toward equanimity and sheer pleasure.
“Civilizations are marked by their priorities…ours are too given over to prisons, malls, and McMansions and too little to good housing for all, complete and sustainable communities, green energy, rational mobility, structures of succor. Politics programs our architecture.”
Awards :
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences
- Graham Foundation Architecture Award
- Fellow in Architecture, Planning, and Design, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Selected Publications :
- Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings
- Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 420N Latitude
- Twenty Minutes in Manhattan
- 250 Things an Architect Should Know