Michael Sorkin, 1948-2020
Mike Davis pays tribute to architect and critic Michael Sorkin, who has died aged 71 of complications caused by Covid-19.
Michael Sorkin died today of coronavirus in an overcrowded hospital and it is a shattering loss. If some people consider me an ‘urban theorist’ it’s only because in 1992 Michael conscripted me to write a chapter in his volume ‘Variations in a Theme Park.’ His ideas have had an immense influence in shaping my own. He was by any measure the most important radical theorist of city life and architecture in the last half century. New Yorkers old enough to have been Village Voice readers in the 1980s when he was the paper’s architecture critic will never forget the war he waged against mega-developers and urban rapists like Donald Trump. Or how in Whitmanesque prose he weekly sang the ballad of New York’s unruly, democratic streets. At a time when postmodernists were throwing dirt over the corpse of the twentieth century, Michael was resurrecting the socialist dreams and libertarian utopias that were the original soul of architectural modernism. When the peoples’ city was under attack he was inevitably the first to march to the sound of the guns. And then … his devilish glee, his kindness, his soaring imagination, his 50,000 volts of creative energy…. I’m drowning my keyboard in tears. Michael, you rat, why did you go when we need you most?
Mike Davis
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