Overview

'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 similarly assembled by many players acting with varying autonomy in a complicit framework. An unfolding terrain of invention, the city is also a means of accommodating disparity, of contextualizing sometimes startling juxtapositions. Sorkin's aim is to widen the debate about the creation of buildings beyond the immediate issues of technology and design. He discusses the politics and culture of architecture with daring, often devastating, observations about the institutions and personalities who have dominated the profession over the past decade. Their preoccupation with the empty style of 'beach houses and Disneyland' has consistently trivialized the full constructive scope of contemporary architecture's possibilities. Sorkin's interventions range from the development scandals of New York where 'skyscrapers stand at the intersection between grid and greed', through the deconstructivist architectural culture of Los Angeles, to the work and ideas of architects, developers and critics such as Alvar Aalto, Norman Foster, Paul Goldberger, Michael Graves, Coop Himmelblau, Philip Johnson, Leon Krier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Rogers, Carlo Scarpa, James Stirling, Donald Trump, Tom Wolfe and Lebbeus Woods. Throughout Sorkin combines stinging polemic with a powerful call for a rebirth of architecture that is visionary and experimental-a recuperated 'dreamy science'

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As an architectural critic Michael Sorkin is unique in America. He is brave, principled, highly informed and fiercely funny. Read him and laugh; read him and weep; but read him, to see why the '80s were so bad for American building. -- Robert Hughes Michael Sorkin is obsessed by the blackbirds of architecture. He hunts them at night. -- John Hejduk Michael Sorkin's brand of writing ... is to thoughtful criticism what the Ayatollah Khomeini is to religious tolerance ... -- Paul Goldberger

As an architectural critic Michael Sorkin is unique in America. He is brave, principled, highly informed and fiercely funny. Read him and laugh; read him and weep; but read him, to see why the '80s were so bad for American building. - Robert Hughes Michael Sorkin is obsessed by the blackbirds of architecture. He hunts them at night. - John Hejduk Michael Sorkin's brand of writing ... is to thoughtful criticism what the Ayatollah Khomeini is to religious tolerance... - Paul Goldberger

Author Information

Michael Sorkin is an award-winning architect and Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York. In 2010, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in architecture. For ten years, Sorkin was architecture critic for the The Village Voice, and he has written for Architectural Record, The New York Times, The Architectural Review, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, Architectural Review, and the Nation. His books include Exquisite Corpses, After the World Trade Center, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan and All Over the Map.

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