Interview with Michael Sorkin
By Karen Tuohey Wing and Scott Wing

UNITS: How have your travels and work abroad contributed to your thinking on American urbanism?

MS: Decisively. Any successful urban practice must grow out of some theory of desirability. The way to learn about good city form is to experience good cities: most of what I know about urbanism has been accumulated through tourism. I can remember, for example, a season in which I visited both Prague and Fez for the first time and the effects were mesmerizing. The textures, dimensions, and styles of adjacency of these places, while dramatically different, are both hugely successful and deeply moving. The question is one of translation. The risk here lies both in direct imitation - however scrupulous – and in the reduction of qualities to a generic physicality. Prague and Fez impress not simply as ossified historical objects but as places in which culture infuses architecture and urban space: the meaning of these places depends on a relationship to a larger cultural context. When their forms are wrested from these originating contexts, meaning is invariably lost. This is not to suggest that it is impossible to recode an urban idea for transformed circumstances – cities do this all the time. The mistake comes in thinking that architecture bears the social meanings that animate it and that those meanings can be lifted from one circumstance and placed in another.

UNITS: Have European urban precedents been misapplied to American conditions?

MS: Yes and no. Much of the work of the so-called new urbanists is predicated on the idea that the grafted authority of historic models can simply be imposed on circumstances completely alien to their origins. But making a place that looks like Paris will not make us Parisians or confer their habits and preferences on us. The art of urbanism lies in the adaptation of space to circumstance. Paris has wonderful ideas to offer New York but only via careful matching of precedent and opportunity.

UNITS: Our students love going to Rome. It’s certainly one of the highlights of their academic career. However, do you think that the issues and circumstances they study there are relevant to the experience they’ll face as architects here? And if not, how do you think that experience abroad could be made more relevant?

MS: I don't think that the relevance of a stay in Rome can be narrowly and practically defined. What the city has to teach lies in the way it matches forms to life. Of course, there are the fascinations of encountering fresh typologies, fresh solutions to generic issues: house form, plazas, street systems, and so on. But, again, the risk is thinking too superficially, thinking that Rome has important things to say about shopping mall design.

UNITS: Did you ever study abroad? If so when, where, etc. Any particularly memorable experiences you would like to share?

MS: I studied one summer at the AA but the real research was in the wandering.

UNITS: You’ve been to State College. You’ve lectured here and critiqued the work of Penn State students in the past. How do you think their college experience (living and learning in a small town in a rural setting) will prepare (or ill-prepare) them for the issues they’ll face when they become architects?

MS: Certainly, if State College describes the totality of students' experience of urbanity, God help them. But this is unlikely these days, given cheap airfares and the ubiquity of telecommunications. The question is what kids are taught during their sojourns in the boonies. There's no reason why issues of form, culture, and sustainability cannot be conveyed in a rural setting. Indeed, the college town is about as close as we come these days to utopia and, by this measure, places like State College are hugely successful. The relationship between form and meaning is both very clear and highly ritualized on campus, an excellent model for urban life.

UNITS: How do you think the experience of your Vienna students differs from your City College students?

MS: One of the glories of American higher education (and City College is exemplary) is the diversity of the student population. This can create a prodigious cross-fertilizing energy. In Vienna, this was less so. Over there, pluralism meant having a German in the class. Such lack of variety can make for a dull experience.

UNITS: Can you provide a little info on the make-up of the Michael Sorkin Studio?

MS: Yes. The studio is small. We are two at the moment and have never been larger than six. The primary focus is urbanism and our specialty is unsolicited masterplanning. I am committed to the possibility of a non-oppressive "all-at-once" planning because I think that certain ideas can only be expressed via a comprehensive research. I believe that virtual networks, environmental consciousness, and our huge mobility present fresh circumstances for the city and that the task of inventing urban form is very much alive. Because of the increasing homogeneity of global culture, however, it is especially critical the city must be rethought both from a technical and from an artistic perspective: the winnowing of cultural difference must be resisted by bold invention and new ideas of locality.

UNITS: What percentage of your work is abroad? Is that more or less than in the past? How do you see it shaping up in the future?

MS: Lots of our projects are for sites abroad. Since we don't wait for clients to begin projects, we can focus on places that raise tasty issues.

UNITS: James (Wines) has raved about your Jerusalem project. Can you give us a few details?

MS: The Jerusalem project is the outgrowth of a conference I organized three years ago to bring Palestinian, Israeli, and other architects and urbanists together to discuss the future of the city in physical terms, via the medium of a design proposal. The assumption was that there were certain issues - the environment, neighborhood development, transportation, sprawl - that could be discussed outside of the discourse of politics. Of course, this was simply a convenient fiction but it worked. The resulting projects will be published in April in a book entitled The Next Jerusalem.

UNITS: You have criticized the dominant architectural press for its preoccupation with “star” architects and high-profile buildings at the exclusion of housing, transportation, and urban infrastructure and issues of social equity.  How have you sought to change this balance? What advice do you offer to students interested in the social domain of architecture?

MS: Through my own work and writing and through a quiet whine in the background of the dominant architectural culture. All architecture inhabits a social domain but our system privileges wealth as the site of architectural invention. This is hardly shocking but it is also not inevitable. Back in the sixties, many of us thought the system so corrupt that the idea of practicing architecture became impossible, a sell out. Now I prefer to see architectural practice both for its ameliorative strength and for its possibilities as propaganda.

UNITS: You have gained a reputation as a muckraker, rooting out the political and social network apparatus of the architectural establishment.  What are the primary issues that are of concern to you and should concern other architects and students?

MS: Outside the miserable inequities in the distribution of wealth - a gap that has been growing by leaps and bounds, the great issue for architecture - also a question of the distribution of resources - is the environment. Here architecture has a tremendous contribution to make. We cannot continue to fetishize the architectural equivalent of Cadillacs and SUV's without dreadful consequences for the planet. An architecture attuned to planetary systems and limits is vital and urgent.

UNITS: Have you been involved with land development codification since the writing of Local Code?

MS: Only as a pedagogical tool.

UNITS: On the www.archilab.org web site, I saw the House for the Near Future design/description. Was that intended for any particular location?

MS: This was a kind of rural co-housing proposal for some unspecified site in the US around 43 degrees north latitude.

UNITS: Thank you for your time!