The latest instalment of our new series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
As we launch our issue on Criticism, with this week’s reading list we encourage you to devour the work of architect and activist Michael Sorkin. Sorkin saw design and criticism as ‘simply different registers of the same expression’, and much of his practice entwined the two.
Sorkin did not idealise architecture – he was aware that any transformation would not come without a struggle for wider political change – yet he was undoubtedly hopeful for what architecture might achieve, particularly in the fight for social justice.
Register for free to read today and receive the AR Reading List straight to your inbox. Stay safe, and happy reading!
- Critical Mass: why architectural criticism matters, AR June 2014
‘I see criticism − and there is some utility in separating it from theory − as a service profession. Not that I think of myself as an architectural barista brewing up steaming cups of truth, but that my perspective is increasingly both quantum and moral and that here criticism truly must be practical’
- Michael Sorkin on living with nature, AR March 2013
‘We are also in the midst of a broad epistemological shift − a re-understanding of our relationship to ‘natural’ forces’
- Michael Sorkin on Ada Louise Huxtable, AR June 2013
‘While Huxtable’s work cannot be described as counter-cultural and she had little to write about the implications for architecture of the planetary events that roiled the times, she did have a strong moral centre and her eye was good, if narrowly focused’
- Michael Sorkin on the rival competition to the Helsinki Guggenheim, AR February 2015
‘Our motivation is to cry against this egregious act of high-Starbucks cultural imperialism’
- Forest of Light by Kyu Sung Woo Architects: an artful provision of mixed-use space, AR May 2016
‘The project is removed from the quotidian hurly-burly of the city and yields both continuity with, and distinction from, the haphazard, irregular, smaller-scaled order of its surroundings’
- Outrage: Starchitects are putting lipstick on a rash(er) of enormous Manhattan pigs, AR August 2015
‘The increasingly precise resemblance of our skyline to a bar graph of real-estate prices is no coincidence’
- Future Frontiers: Michael Sorkin on Humanity, February 2014 at the Royal College of Art
Subscribe today to join the conversation and help support independent critical architectural writing. Digital subscriptions are available and all our content is available online, anywhere in the world
