Michael Sorkin Studio: Wiggle

by Michael Sorkin

Michael Sorkin is one of the most visible and talked-about architects today. He was for several years the influential and outspoken architectural critic at the Village Voice, a critical and polemical a " yet humorous a " voice in contemporary culture. In recent years he has begun to focus on his own work. This is the first complete volume on the multifaceted architecture and design projects of the Michael Sorkin Studio. The work of the studio is grounded in the belief that the city is both the primary source of the social meaning of the architecture and the most important challenge confronting the profession today. Particularly significant is the ongoing inquiry into prospective forms sustainable, post-technological cities, presented here in a range of formal experiments that examine architecture at different scales. Many of the projects are theoretical and experimental a " part invention and part critique a " and come to fruition through drawings, models, exhibitions, writings, and installations. All of these are shown in the book, accompanied by Sorkin's own texts, which discuss the goals of each project, the influences on it, and the research and design process, as well as its architectural, social, and political commentary. Sorkin believes that every architect has to reinvent architecture, and this book is a record of the research behind his own ambitious attempts at reinvention.

192 pages, Paperback

Published September 21, 1998

About the author

Michael Sorkin (1948, Washington, D.C.- March 2020, New York) was an American architectural critic and author of several hundred articles in a wide range of both professional and general publications. He was the Principal of Michael Sorkin Studio in New York City, a design practice devoted to both practical and theoretical projects at all scales, with special interest in sustainable urban environments/green city architecture. He was also Chair of the Institute for Urban Design, a non-profit organization that provides a forum for debate over critical issues in contemporary urban planning, development and design.

From 1993 to 2000 he was Professor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He has been a professor at numerous schools of architecture including the Architectural Association, the Aarhus School of Architecture, Cooper Union, Carleton, Columbia, Yale (holding both the Davenport and Bishop Chairs), Harvard and Cornell (the Gensler Chair). He is currently Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York.

Dedicated to urbanism as both an artistic practice and a medium for social amelioration, Sorkin has conducted studios in such stressed environments as Jerusalem, Nicosia, Johannesburg, Havana, Cairo, Kumasi, Hanoi, Nueva Loja (Ecuador) and Wuhan (China). In 2005 -2006, he directed studio projects for the post-Katrina reconstruction of Biloxi and New Orleans.