What Goes Up: The Right and Wrongs to the City

by Michael Sorkin

Overview

A radical architect examines the changing fortunes of the contemporary city

Michael Sorkin is one of the most forthright and engaging architectural writers in the world. In What Goes Up he takes to task the public officials, developers, “civic” organizations, and other heroes of big money, who have made of Sorkin’s beloved New York a city of glittering towers and increasing inequality. He unpacks not simply the forms and practices—from zoning and political deals to the finer points of architectural design—that shape cities today but also offers spirited advocacy for another kind of city, reimagined from the street up on a human scale, a home to sustainable, just, and fulfilling neighborhoods and public spaces.

Informing his writing is a lifetime’s experience as an architect and urbanist. Sorkin writes of the joys and techniques of observing and inhabiting cities and buildings in order to both better understand and to more happily be in them. Sorkin has never been shy about naming names. He has been a scourge of design mediocrity and of the supine compliance of “starchitects,” who readily accede to the demands of greed and privilege. What Goes Up casts the net wide, as he directs his arguments to students, professionals, and urban citizens with vigor, expertise, respect, and barbed wit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786635150
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	04/17/2018
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Michael Sorkin is an award-winning architect, Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York, as well as President of the non-profit architecture and urban think tank Terreform. In 2010, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in architecture and, in 2013, the National Design Award in the Design Mind category. For ten years, Sorkin was architecture critic for the Village Voice; he is currently the critic at the Nation and writes regularly for Architectural Record and the Architectural Review. His books include Exquisite Corpse, Some Assembly Required, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Wiggle, and All Over the Map.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

New York, New York, New York

1 Jane's Spectacles 17

2 New York Triptych 21

3 A Dozen Urgent Suggestions for the Village 25

4 NYU's Tipping Point 35

5 Occupying Wall Street 39

6 The Sidewalks of New York 43

7 Learning the Hard Way 46

8 Sandy 49

9 Ada Louise Huxtable 52

10 Ground Zero Sum 55

11 Marshall Berman 1940-2013 62

12 The Fungibility of Air 65

13 Big MoMA's House 73

14 What's behind the Poor Door 79

15 Ups and Downs 88

16 Little Boxes 95

17 Business as Usual 102

18 Big and Bigger 108

19 Another City 113

20 Sow's Ears 121

21 Lost at Sea 124

22 Getting Together 132

23 The Cathedral at Ground Zero 140

24 A New New York, the Same Old Story 148

25 Manhattan Transfer 153

26 Preserving People 168

Elsewhere and Otherwise

27 Need to Know? 175

28 A Reminiscence of Hollin Hills 179

29 Back to the Burbs 185

30 Architecture without Capitalism 194

31 Informal Formality 200

32 The Trials of Rafi Segal 211

33 Krier ♥ Speer 220

34 Rumble in the Urban Jungle 229

35 Working Drawings 233

36 Cells Out! 238

37 Presidents and Libraries 246

38 Critical Measure 255

39 Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know 277

40 Bull in China's Shop 285

41 Civilian Objects 294

42 Clear Light 301

43 The Architect as Worker 306

44 Travels with Zaha 316

45 Pinkwashing Zion Square 319

46 Burden of Gilt 323

47 Architecture against Trump 332

48 The City after the Autonomobile 336

In Memoriam 341

Acknowledgments 344

Chapter Credits 346

Index 349

Editorial Reviews

04/09/2018
In this collection of bracing, irreverent essays, most of which focus on New York City and are very short, Sorkin (The Next Jerusalem), professor of architecture and director of the graduate program in urban design at the City College of New York, tackles the moral and aesthetic questions arising from the urban built environment. He points up similarities between the Ground Zero memorial and gothic cathedrals, uses Occupy Wall Street as a jumping-off point to ask whether architecture can “live without capitalism,” and calls out New York’s first microapartments as “too small” for anyone other than “childless Zen masters and anal retentives.” He argues that the spatial and the social are impossible to pry apart: “New York’s... urbanism, for better or worse, is exactly one of negotiation, the architecture of the deal, and the deal is always between public and private interests.... The deck continues to be stacked against the public and the sum is never zero.” In clever, energetic prose that bounces between the scholarly and the excitably conversational, Sorkin calls for specific changes that would increase affordable housing, speed the transition to carbon neutrality, and enact a commitment to equity for marginalized communities—and, less predictably, for architects to remember “the feel of cool marble under bare feet.” Sorkin’s delight in architecture and public spaces suffuses this fierce and timely book. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Easily one of the best architecture critics around … Sorkin is a flaneur with a sense of public purpose.”
—Guardian

“America’s most invigorating writer on architecture.”
—Observer

“Sorkin is a formidable opponent of the banal, the ugly, the stupid and the vapidly posturing which, he argues, are all around us.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Michael Sorkin secures his claim to succeed Jane Jacobs … He brings to bear an eye every bit as acute, a pen nearly as trenchant, and a political understanding perhaps a little bit more sophisticated of the never-ending struggle over New York’s neighbourhoods.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“Sorkin is one of the most intelligent writers on architecture today.”

—Library Journal

“What Goes Up is a series of pithy and piquant essays on the twin problems facing New York and many other large cities: affordability and climate change.”
—Bennett Baumer, Indypendent


“Through masterful language and sentence crafting, he weaves together complex ideas, such as the role media and new technologies play in our digital age and their impact on privacy issues, as well as the new context this sets up for the creation of architecture and public space … The need for a critical voice has never been more important. Witness, chronicler, and analyst, Sorkin provides a framework in his writing for critical evaluation of the architectural process and works to ensure that the city remains a place for people.”
—Architecture Boston

From the Publisher