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What Goes Up:The Right and Wrongs To the City
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The rise and fall of New York – a radical architect’s view of the destruction of the city
Michael Sorkin is one of the most forthright and engaging architectural writers in the world. In What Goes Up he charts the dehumanising regimes of mayors Bloomberg and De Blasio that created a city of glittering towers and increasing inequality. He looks at what has happened to Ground Zero, as a place of memory has been reconstructed by "staritects" and turned into malls. The city, he suggests, has to be reimagined from the street up on a human scale, to develop new ways to revitalise neighbourhoods.
Alongside these essays on New York, Sorkin also brings his lifetime’s experience as an architect to bear. He talks of the joy of observing a city in order to understand it. Why a young designer must learn to draw by hand rather than only use a computer. There are also personal encounters with some of the greatest names who have changed the city. Sorkin gets lost in Rio with Zaha Hadid and talks about the old Bronx with Marshall Berman.
Reviews
Easily one of the best architecture critics around ... Sorkin is a flaneur with a sense of public purpose
America's most invigorating writer on architecture.
Sorkin is one of the most intelligent writers on architecture today.
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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 -
I am glad Sorkin doesn't take the subway: this is the most brilliant epitome of Manhattan ever written
Mike Davis [On Twenty Minutes in Manhattan] -
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 [On Twenty Minutes in Manhattan] -
<i>What Goes Up</i> is a series of pithy and piquant essays on the twin problems facing New York and many other large cities: affordability and climate change.
, The 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