Who was Michael Sorkin?

Michael Sorkin was an architect and urban planner who made a name for himself not only for what he designed, i.e. sustainable projects in architecture and urban planning, but also as a writer and teacher. Many see him as one of the most brilliant authors of critical articles and scholarly publications of our time, and from the way his texts are constructed, I’m sure he must have been an amazing lecturer - one of those whose classes are packed to the rafters and never left anyone dozing off. He clearly recognised and respected his students, at least judging by the sensitivity with which he occasionally mentions them in his writings.

Not everyone agreed with him, but his opinion was highly valued - which is why he taught at nearly two dozen prestigious universities, such as the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the Architectural Association in London and the Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark. In the United States, he lectured at Cooper Union, Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Cornell. Since 2000, he headed up the urban planning programme at the City College of New York, which he really loved and was proud of.

In his private practice, he ran the design firm Michael Sorkin Studio as well as Terreform, a non-profit corporation primarily engaged in environmental planning research. I'm referring to him in the past tense, as he sadly died of COVID-19 in March 2020 at the height of his career. It was a truly unexpected and painful loss.

Sorkin is often considered a radical critic of architecture. Why?

He drew on the tradition represented by Jane Jacobs. In fact, he devoted the very first chapter of his book to her. He also had extensive experience of the rebellious 1960s, particularly their self-help communities and squatting. He was not impressed by the big names of contemporary starchitects - he was not afraid to point out how uninteresting their works really are, yet on the other hand he was able to appreciate many of them. What mattered most to him were equity and equal access to resources rather than the aesthetic qualities of architectural and urban design, although he also saw those as important.

For Czech readers, his ideas may be even more radical, as we do not have such a strong left-wing tradition and our historical experience means Marxism bears a great deal of stigma. However, perhaps that's why it's time to stop being afraid of labels and think realistically about Sorkin's ideas, as what he was writing about years ago is starting to happen in big cities around the Czech Republic, namely that the exclusion of less privileged groups leads to a loss of authenticity and diversity in urban life - and thus to the loss of its vitality.

What topics are covered in What Goes Up?

The work is a collection of shorter reflections on various topics, all of which revolve around architecture, urbanism, their impact on society and the questions they raise for the future. The first part is more specific and largely focuses on the United States, and New York in particular, but the conclusions reached are more general. The second part is rather more abstract, but here too it draws on specific examples, such as from South America, where one person he travelled with was architect Zaha Hadid.

The book came out in 2018. How relevant is it today? And in what ways has it aged?

Yes, that's right, many parts are even older, as it's a collection of works, the oldest written as far back as 2010. We are now seeing some of them with a certain distance, especially those parts about buildings that were not yet completed at the time, or the policies of particular mayors and governments. Nevertheless, given how ahead of his time his reflections were, and in view of the fact that we Czechs are only gradually beginning to address many of these issues, I’d say that he’s highly relevant for us today.

Sorkin, for example, takes it for granted that cities should be inclusive, i.e. take account of all their users, including the disadvantaged, and that transport should be multimodal, with less of a focus on cars. So, for example, he dreamed of a streetcar running up and down Manhattan's main avenue. He also showed the problems that suburbs bring, as well as the fallacy of the idea that their residents are just fulfilling the American dream of owning property that they themselves have earned. He explains that, in fact, their construction was the result of numerous subsidies and various forms of support - and to this day running them is expensive and subsidised in terms of infrastructure. His arguments are perfectly rational, informed and specific. Nowadays, ideas like this are actually trendy, but many Czech politicians and much of society still see them as very radical. I’m therefore pleased that our readers have access to such a well-reasoned, sophisticated, and widely respected point of view.

Sorkin was born in Greenwich Village and later relocated to Tribeca, by then a gentrified and affluent neighbourhood. Does his association with these specific New York neighbourhoods come through in the book?

He was undoubtedly influenced by it and also refers very specifically to his life in both places. Sorkin liked to write about what he could see from his window or walked past on his way to work every day. Yes, he walked a lot and was proud of it. So his writing often reflects this experience. For Czech readers, it's a great advantage that he writes about a city we all have at least some indirect experience of, since it appears in countless films, books, and even newspaper reports – unlike the great cities of Africa, South America, or Asia, it is still part of our primary cultural sphere. I myself only spent a short time in New York, and yet I somehow always knew what he was writing about before I started to look up the details. And I found out, just as I did from the book The Invisible City, published by IPR Prague last year, plenty of fascinating little tidbits! It's also interesting how he reflected on the change of his move from a social and perhaps even psychological point of view - how he perceived it in himself.

What does Sorkin think of his contemporary New York? What are its problems? What challenges does it face?

From the perspective of my reading of his book, the greatest danger is that New York’s urban landscape, meaning its individual buildings as well as the spaces between them, will be shaped by powerful financial players upon whom the city's political leaders will be unable to impose sufficient conditions. Sufficient in terms of what is needed to ensure the city's overall sustainability, but also to maximise its potential. He also speaks of the danger of densification, which in his view is necessary to curb urban sprawl into the countryside and the decline of the city centre, but it is certainly not a cure-all solution and carries with it certain risks that are often underestimated. He also highlights specific examples of how well-intentioned ideas put forward by city leaders to address the housing shortage can have devastating effects. And, of course, given climate change, he also fears that action to counter its effects will be too slow or unfair.

Sorkin leans heavily into the housing crisis and cost of living, gentrification and the commercialisation of public space. He criticises the 9/11 memorial on Wall Street in this regard. Could you elaborate on these attitudes?

I think that Sorkin is probably the most torn in the matter of Ground Zero and the area around it, and this book also clearly reflects the fact that the texts were written gradually as the whole area was built up. On the one hand, he is very demanding as regards the quality of the buildings constructed there and the demarcation of both remembrance and commercial zones; on the other hand, he's not afraid to praise a controversial building such as Calatrava's PATH station house. It's understandable - firstly, he experienced the tragedy himself and was deeply affected by it, which set his expectations, and secondly, as a "local" he often used to walk around the new buildings and watched them rise.

Personally, I also found it interesting how strongly he condemns things such as Columbia University's plans to build a campus in the inner city, not to mention the dealings involving the sale of air rights on as-yet undeveloped plots. In both cases, the point is that the city can become too unified, too single-purpose in a given area, and as a result it risks being degraded.

Sorkin makes several references to legendary journalist, activist and architecture critic Jane Jacobs. Might one say that he is, in a sense, a successor to her ideas?

Absolutely! As I mentioned before, the very first chapter of the book is dedicated to her, and he continues to return to her legacy. What was important to both of them was the people and how they lived in the city - and, in today's terms, whether they could afford to live there at all. I think what connected them was something that, though originally said by someone else, also appears in the book almost word for word: namely, that the free development of each of us is the condition for the free development of all. Both also shared the view that cities should be designed for people, not for cars and bureaucratic ideals. Sorkin, like Jacobs, advocated participatory planning and stressed the importance of the local context and community in architecture and urbanism. Or, to put it another way, his work—like that of Jane Jacobs—emphasised sustainability, social justice, and the authenticity of urban life.

What do you think Czech readers can get from the book in 2024?

In my opinion, these are the topics that probably elicit the greatest controversy today when it comes to decision-making in architecture and urban planning. How can we ensure that those with lower incomes who keep the city running on a day-to-day basis can continue to live there? And how to do it in such a way that they can live with dignity and are not all squeezed into unified housing estates, which then act as a catalyst for all sorts of problems? How to make sure that they are not thrown into their housing, but play a part in it? Where to seek inspiration for alternative approaches to urban planning for housing like this? When I want to build a really important and pivotal structure in the city, what approach do I take to the designs put forward by starchitects - is their name and experience a guarantee of quality? And what about public space that the city does not have enough money for, and is therefore happy to take advantage of a financially strong developer handling it - yet at the cost of it becoming commercialised? How are these games actually played and are there any winners? And should an architect, urban planner, or policymaker be the one to address these matters? What should they be guided by? All these questions are, from my point of view, increasingly relevant for the present day, and not only for us.

How does Sorkin write?

I love Sorkin's language. And I hate it! Sorkin is immensely erudite, a brilliant thinker, and an accomplished speaker. He writes ten-line sentences that are nonetheless condensed with thought—and loaded with references. He mixes bookish expressions, which you won't find even in more common dictionaries, with New York slang and sometimes even vulgarisms. When I sit down with him, it's like I'm doing Sudoku. Can it all be put it together like that? Have I got everything in there? Is it even readable? And does it still flow as smoothly and entertainingly as in the original? I have to say that before I gave the first half of the book to my editor to read, I was pretty anxious about what she’d say. And I’m used to working on demanding philosophical texts, which also require a great deal of concentration and careful choice of words as well as analytical precision. I really hope that the result will be successful and that Czech readers will not miss out too much, although the original is always simply the original.

Well, for anyone interested in state-of-the-art technology, for me this text is an example that just goes to prove why the human translator is irreplaceable, even though today AI can be a great help. I myself consulted some of the trickier passages with ChatGPT and I must say that it sometimes helped me to unravel them by paraphrasing. This was especially evident with the slang, which I personally find more challenging and the ChatGPT language model contains a lot of it from back when it was created and trained.

How did you find translating the book? What was the most difficult thing about it, not to mention the most fun?

I'd like to mention two more things. The first is that even though Sorkin expresses some very complex ideas, and seems rambling in places, he still holds the text together brilliantly - and that's always a hugely satisfying experience for me as a translator. It's extremely rewarding when, in translation, one does not have to patch up missing arcs of logical bridges and structures of thought that start to crumble as soon as you prod them. Not everyone is able to write like that, and I'm talking about respected theorists. And the other thing that can be a bit tricky is the ton of references he uses. Right now, I’m really grappling with how to handle the footnotes. Sorkin often mentions some extremely fascinating things merely in passing that his readers or listeners in the States are certainly more familiar with than we are here in the Czech Republic, and they catch on quickly. In general, I don’t like footnotes at all, they tend to disrupt and break up the text, but here I just couldn’t resist slipping a few in. Well, in the second half of the book, which is more reflective and abstract, they suddenly piled up so much that I got the impression I should remove them. But they're so... Important! It's terrible, and I think I'll have to discuss it with the book’s editor and proofreader. Readers will then be able to judge for themselves whether the decision was the right one.