What Goes Up

April 9, 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.