Walk and Talk

On my way there, I had taken a circuitous route through Morningside Park, getting somewhat confused in its winding paths, which I had forgotten were so drastically vertical. In his 2009 psychogeographic work Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, the late architect and critic Michael Sorkin describes how he and his neighbors “refuse perfect knowledge” of the irregular, un-gridded portion of the West Village where they live. They protect a private forgetfulness “in order to retain the possibility of getting a little bit lost” within their own stomping grounds—one of life’s greatest minor pleasures. The stairways of Morningside Park were not my stomping grounds, yet there I stomped, uphill, resisting the urge to fully enmesh myself with the virtual topography of my phone, refusing perfect knowledge. When I had finally situated myself on Amsterdam Avenue, on the border of Columbia University’s campus, I was hot, kind of turned around, and longing for a cheese sandwich, a prandial quirk acquired from many childhood readings of adventure stories where the characters always seem to produce a ploughman’s lunch under a nice, shady tree whenever they are directionally discombobulated. With a certain measure of relief, I walked up to a filigreed iron gate, which was wide open.

“This gate is closed,” a loud voice said.

The gate was, might I reiterate, wide open. In fact, if you asked a young child to represent the word open in its most abstract sense, they might draw, given no other prompt, this exact gate. It was an openness that transcended the merely physical and approached the semiotic.

Initially, the speaker had been out of my line of vision; it had felt like a proclamation from the heavens, some kind of faith test (Up is down! Open is closed! Kill your son!) that I usually recuse myself from, being blessedly faithless. Within moments, I craned my head around to see an Allied Universal security guard, wisely perched in the shade behind the gate’s stone pier. It’s a tough gig, enforcing (manifesting? maniforcing?) the blatantly untrue. I had been warned of this up-is-down state of affairs at Columbia. To visit People Cross Against the Light: Michael Sorkin’s New York, the first significant exhibition devoted to Sorkin since his sudden death from Covid-19 in 2020, I was required by the university to contact its Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery a few days in advance so it could generate a digital pass for me to gain access to the campus as an “approved guest.” The school—its walkways, buildings, resources, community, and interstitial zones that once functioned as semipublic space (nice, shady trees, etc.)—has been closed to passless civilians ever since the anti-genocide student movement in 2024, which demanded that the university divest from Israel due to its army’s war crimes in Gaza. A series of lawsuits, petitions, and rallies have attempted to reopen the campus, but as of this summer, wandering in—or across, given that College Walk formerly provided a widely used pedestrian thoroughfare between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues—was not an option.

There was an unshakable melancholy in encountering Sorkin’s visions of a different New York within this context: a battleground about the right to wander and the right to protest, where the realities of an open gate are denied, a paranoid retreat into a more privatized city in response to the courageous efforts of young people to leverage the structural space of the university for a less deathful world. Even the exhibition’s title, a paean to jaywalking with the aura of Dylan Thomas, is borrowed from Sorkin’s essay “Nine Fabulous Things About New York,” which opens with the insight “Great cities require a certain level of insubordination.” “By crossing freely,” he writes, “we establish the importance of making the city tractable to our individual desires and proclaim our independence from arbitrary authority.” It is this “crossing freely,” combined with a committed and methodical neighborliness, that underpins much of Sorkin’s ethos. (And it is precisely the same that is being drained out of this six-block stretch of Morningside Heights by Columbia’s solipsistic restrictions.) Sorkin conceived of a different New York but also a pro-difference New York, a city that embraced and amplified what individuates, on the level of both the person and the landscape, as the key to making more things more communal.

Everything in People Cross Against the Light, curated by Bart-Jan Polman and sponsored by Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, which has recently acquired Sorkin’s papers and drawings, was a document of a dream. Speculative, that is, in the most fictional sense. The small room presented a series of hypotheticals, except for the selected examples of Sorkin’s early criticism, which were quoted in an accompanying broadsheet and displayed in a vitrine of ephemera. Unlike all the buildings that never culminated past the drawing or model stage, Sorkin’s writing already exists in its most complete possible version; it is fully “built,” so to speak. It is what it is and it is brilliant—buoyant, mischievous, cutting when necessary, vast in reference and implication but staggeringly precise in adjective—although the full scope of that brilliance was inevitably hampered by the nature of excerption. There could be multiple interpretations of Polman’s decision to open the show with this body of work, subsumed into a single project, one of nine in all (another nine fabulous things about New York). At first glance, the layout appeared purely chronological—Sorkin’s exemplary tenure as an architecture critic at The Village Voice ran from 1978 to 1988, and the first text in the show is from 1968. The following eight design projects were presented in a roughly sequential order, moving from 1987 to 1996, a period of extreme transformation in New York’s understanding of itself as a city.

This chronology helpfully lined up with another implied curatorial aim. Sorkin’s reputation as a critic was esteemed yet remarkably contentious—in a delectable and representative tidbit, after Sorkin masterfully detailed New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger’s big-money toadyism in his Village Voice column, Goldberger rejoined that Sorkin’s writing “is to thoughtful criticism what the Ayatollah Khomeini is to religious tolerance,” which Sorkin then used as a blurb on the back of his own book, Exquisite Corpse (1991). (The pair eventually reached rapprochement. In 2006, Goldberger admitted to The Architect’s Newspaper that in the case of their “nastiest argument” about Times Square, “the basic design schemes were terrible and I was much too forgiving of them.” He was listed under “Special Thanks” in the show’s acknowledgements.) The exhibition, therefore, attempted to balance out this particular notoriety with Sorkin’s other creative output. “In addition to being a prolific writer with a large audience, Sorkin was also very much a designer,” reminded Polman’s wall text. The writing set the stage for the “also very much” to unfurl, acknowledging a knowing viewer’s potential preconceptions of Sorkin (yes, yes, what a critic, yes, those takedowns) and surprising them with his other, more material forms of intervention, imagining, and analysis (but he also designed!). For me, though, this proved to be a slightly misleading oppositional framework. Sorkin’s design proposals strike me as less of a “but also” and more of an “and, and, and.” Perhaps that is because I am a critic and not an architect, and even more than that, I am a literary critic, not an architecture critic, so I write words about words, rather than words about buildings. (Although sometimes, like right now, I write words about words about buildings—dancing would be more direct!) I find it most fruitful to view Sorkin’s speculative architectural projects as pieces of writing in themselves—not criticism exactly, although they are certainly critical. More like novellas, treatments for unrealized screenplays, haiku sequences, or long prose poems. (I feel weirdly certain that they are not short stories. Take that how you will.) The exhibition closed with an understated addition, a discreet number ten, in the welcome foyer: all of Sorkin’s books. This complicates the “but also” narrative, creating an Ouroboros of writing, but their placement risked being too easily skimmed as a tacked-on bibliography. As the twenty-four-year-old Sorkin wrote in his 1972 essay “A Radical Alternative,” “the search of the radical architect is not for a way of designing but for a place to begin to design. S/he is preoccupied with a process not a product. For me, this essay is part of that process. It is my architecture.” And vice versa.

This literary quality was most emphatic in number three of the nine main displays: a 1987 episode of The Eleventh Hour, a New York public access talk show hosted by the journalist Robert Lipsyte that invited Sorkin and fellow maverick architects Lebbeus Woods and John L. Young to present an alternative to Trump’s proposed Television City development at the former Penn Central Railyards on the Upper West Side. They named their idea Time Square, a lyrical homage to Times Square, which was, at the time, one of the more sleaze-adorned, tatterdemalion stretches of Manhattan, a far cry from the glossy capitalist-cromlech it is today. (“Slime Alley” is the moniker Lipsyte uses.) Their scheme was more of a scenario than a site plan, an exercise in world-building rather than the practicalities of, well, building-building. The trio come across as impish, eccentric—Young only agreed to appear on television anonymously, veiled in a welder’s mask—and, despite their playfulness, seriously devoted to their radical aim of a curiouser, fairer New York City.

Woods, known for his fantastical, energetic pencil drawings of potential architectural interventions in crisis zones, provided the sketched imagery for their proposal: penumbral, raucous, rickety towers of scaffolding, congregations of carnivalesque figures, a little moony, a little Jules Verney. Sorkin wrote a text that imagines life in Time Square in the year 2010 through fragments of future ephemera, including a fictional Michelin Guide entry (three stars!) and a letter from a sightseeing, rather nineteenth century–coded tourist reminiscent of Dickens’s American Notes. Young, mysteriously, provided “research,” according to the wall text. Mystery is to be expected from Young—he would later collaborate with Deborah Natsios, his wife and fellow architect (and daughter of a former CIA officer), to develop the WikiLeaks precursor Cryptome, a website that hosts thousands of classified government documents, most notably the names of secret agents and critical infrastructure information. A “tip off [to] the terrorists” is how a 2004 headline in the Times characterized its archive. (Young also participated in the 1968 occupation of Columbia’s Avery Hall while a design student there, in protest of the university’s involvement in military research during the Vietnam War, as well as its plan for a nearby gym where local Harlem residents and Columbia students would be designated separate floors, creating an environment of de facto segregation—as Ada Louise Huxtable wrote at the time, “Architecture was, in a sense, the spark that ignited the revolt. It has been central to the student rebellion.”) Young is an elusive figure and his profound influence on Sorkin appears in flashes; for example, he was listed as a semicovert collaborator on Mass Movement, another project in the show, and Sorkin dedicated his 1993 utopian epic, Local Code, written entirely in the dialect of municipal regulation, to Young.

Time Square was an amplification of everything that was already happening, everything that was already being built, on the so-called abandoned site of the railyards: the ad hoc, folk architecture designed, constructed, and maintained by itinerant and unhoused communities. “Once upon a time, people were homeless in New York by no choice of their own,” begins Sorkin’s script, immediately establishing a tone more appropriate to the fairy tale than the technical blueprint. The project proposes a neighborhood for people dubbed “the hermits,” who opt “to live outside the structures of society.” “We salute the residents of the margins,” the voiceover of the short film declares. Invoking the density of the casbah and the capriccios of Piranesi, Sorkin’s language is self-consciously formal and romantic, conjuring a transcendent first-person plural that “cherish[es]” the archetypically rejected: the outsider, the traveler, the city’s forgotten man, straight out of the Hoovervilles in My Man Godfrey (1936). The narrator describes shifting walls and crisscrossing shafts of light, a layout that is never fixed, suspended gardens and descending gondolas “glowing celestially.” Lipsyte refers to Time Square as a “scientific shantytown,” but to me, it sounds more like an improvisational, gateless lavra, a huddled array of hermitages constituting a kind of collaborative monk village in ancient Christian traditions—fittingly, the word comes from the Greek term for a narrow city street, or an alleyway.

Little about the architecture of Time Square is actually disclosed, but the voiceover says that the space offers “the first true realization of a city district conceived in multiple layers rather than a series of individual buildings.” This seemingly small detail, tucked inside the ornate narrative, hints at an abiding theme in Sorkin’s work. In Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, he describes how movement throughout a city is usually “confined to a single plane, what’s called ‘grade,’ the ground level.” Oftentimes, a subway system offers a workable, subterranean second grade—“another circulation datum, a horizontal lamination”—but as a web of enclosed tunnels, it has limited range. Could there be a third grade of movement not below but above us, “glowing celestially?” Could we travel through it not only on the vertical axis of the elevator but also on the horizontal axis of the alleyway? Sorkin was not afraid of density, and his proposals rarely required a razed, empty plot of land, which is, in a city, inevitably a kind of scar, a mark of excision. (Although he was not opposed to basic obstruction: East New York, from 1995, maps out various busy intersections, leaving them basically intact but with a big tree planted right in middle.) Instead, he imagined building layers atop layers, working around and among what is, as in the overlooked usage of the railyards, already there.

Almost all the projects featured in People Cross Against the Light carry this distinctive feature: a floatingness. For Sorkin, this was an aesthetic as well as a conceptual prerogative. Many of his designs stand on legs (leggier than the standard modernist pilotis), such as the series of biomorphic Animal Houses (1989–1993) and the lifted loft on Church Street (1991). A sense of verticality, a push upward, is obviously not an unusual interest in a sky-scraping city, but this is a more subtle way of relating to that city’s airspace, imagining it as another interconnected stratum, a further, suspended tier of potential mobility and collectivity. The closest thing to a conventional skyscraper in the exhibition was Sorkin’s unsolicited 1987 proposal for an entertainment center at the Times Tower site, Mass Movement, which, from certain vantages, verges on satire. A stack of disparate, asymmetrical shapes—a disco, a theater, a hotel—appear to almost teeter, each rotating at different speeds on a slender spinal column. It looks like the delicately balanced rock piles one might come across hiking, except each rock is a blimp, a space station, a Ferris wheel. Whereas the monolith wishes vulnerability away, the spindled form accommodates precarity but also an unexpected equilibrium. It’s strange—“strange enough to justify the effort of building it” is how Sorkin jovially characterizes the idea in a fax to Woods, which I think is key to all his proposals—and unavoidably vertiginous. The building winks and spins, asking us to claim what we want when we want a tower, what we want when we want to be entertained.

In a 2013 summary of his proposed projects for Architectural Design, Sorkin writes that one of the Animal Houses, Sheep, a stocky, raised structure that holds a kaleidoscopic array of unusual apartments, like the many chambers of an ovine’s ruminant stomach, presents “an abiding problematic in any architect’s work”: the “eternal dialectic of elevation and excavation—the cave versus the tree house.” Do we burrow deeper into the earth or balance hopefully above it? These are also the questions animals ask of their homes, and their own bodies. The fine line between the body and the dwelling is revealed in the Animal Houses, four of which appeared in the exhibition: Sheep plus Aardvark, Dog, and Frog. These models are pure pleasure, articulated beautifully by Kent Hikida, a former member of the Michael Sorkin Studio, mixing a loping-along whimsicality with a quiet, profound wisdom. From a distance, they are shaped like rudimentary children’s toys, the rough but recognizable outlines of familiar animals. I want to be clear: This is a compliment. It was especially charming to see Sorkin’s initial plywood model for Dog, constructed without Hikida’s assistance, which really does look like an under-five drawing of a doggish thing, an almost dog—again, I mean this as the highest praise. It is a rare adult who can access this kind of visual thinking, which is also found in many of Sorkin’s sketches: a rawness, irreverence, and bulbosity, equal parts Philip Guston and the chalk drawings of childhood sidewalks, à la Helen Levitt. (The difference between Hikida’s Dog and Sorkin’s Dog also accentuates the division of labor that upholds any and all architectural work, the many hands that author a thing, and the range of things a single idea can hold.) Sorkin looks to the skeleton in all its oddity—curved and angular, flexible and rigid, symmetrical and, at times, bizarrely off-kilter—to answer how something might stand, work, even wander. The living spaces in a multi dwelling building are conceived as “organs,” with all its interdependent complexity: each with their own individual function but unable to exist alone. Like so much of Sorkin’s insight, this principle applies to the building on the level of the room but also to the level of the street, and to the city at large.

Animal shapes reappear in Tracked Houses from 1990, another proposal for the inert Penn Central Railyards, which Sorkin described as “loft-beasts.” I found this project quite moving, despite its “polemical” nature. A series of peculiar “kit-in-parts” structures, on wheels, attach to abandoned railcars—in fact, Sorkin proposes that more inactive railcars be delivered from around the country to be repurposed in Upper Manhattan. These small towers make each carriage they are hooked onto appear a bit like a dinosaur or a hedgehog or a buffalo: Each is different and available to be rearranged and reconceived, codesigned by its user. Sorkin wrote that they were “admittedly cartoonish,” but they still take themselves seriously as apartments—window full, with enough space, elegant lines, interesting details. Their wheeled-ness is similar to the floatingness of other projects: Tracked Houses offers up the idea of moving around in an unusual way, which is to say, living together with enough capaciousness to accommodate many individual habits of movement. Again, they work with the preexisting actuality of the site, honoring the ingenuity of those already using the railcars as their homes, instead of simply disappearing the space and the people inside it.

At the end of the episode of The Eleventh Hour, there is an interview with an unnamed woman who lives at the site of Trump’s proposed development, under the West Side Highway. This isn’t footage by Sorkin and his collaborators; it was simply attached to their segment by the production team, but I think he would have liked it. With a big smile and a lot of pride, the woman explains how she’s been living there for “going on five years” and has taught many people how to “build makeshift homes.” “You give us space and we’ll build our own homes,” she says. “It takes a lot of work, and it takes a lot of caring, and these guys, they care. They care about their homes and they care about being warm.” She describes building with found bamboo curtains, laying out carpeting, “mak[ing] it look like a real home.” My favorite part of the segment is when she walks along the various structures and starts critiquing them—“This is supposed to be a house,” she laughs, “but hey! The person’s got themselves warm, I guess.” Moving on, she notices one she likes more: “That one is pretty good.” Like Sorkin, she is both a critic and a working architect, and these are intertwined practices. When the interviewer asks her about Trump’s plan to develop the site, she responds gently but with a certain wryness, “Donald Trump is doing a lot of running around, running away from a reality that, someday soon, he will have to face. This is real—Television City, that’s a fantasy.… It’s animation.” The projects highlighted in People Cross Against the Light are also objects of fantasy, but they never run away from New York City. They amble within it, wander around it, crossing through, crossing against. As Sorkin writes in the opening of his monograph Wiggle (1998), “Any fantasy of urbanity that wants to be built should be a fantasy of desirability.” May we all learn from Sorkin by imagining this city as the strangest, kindest, most liberatory possible version of itself. The gate is open.