Remember the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who exposed the all-too-obvious fact that the emperor was naked? If reincarnation works, Michael Sorkin is that child immune to the nourishing illusions of the rich and powerful reincarnated in the person of a supremely gifted architecture critic. And just in the nick of time. With so much architectural criticism today veering between laudatory portraits of architectural celebrities on the one hand, and ideological and theoretically-loaded cultural critiques of architects on the other, it is refreshing to read a critic who scans the landscape exposing scams, and heralding genuinely livable, sustainable, and occasionally even affordable urban architecture.

 

Sorkin is a master of the penetrating brief essay, with the overwhelming majority of these punchy sketches originally appearing in Architectural Record. He has played a terrific contrarian to the magazine’s more genteel critics like Robert Campbell and Paul Goldberger. And Sorkin is at his passionate best exactly in those cases where Campbell and Goldberg sound like quibblers. No one in architectural journalism is better in exposing scam, pretense, and cant than Sorkin. And the most memorable pieces in All Over the Map: Writing on Building and Cities (Verso, 2011) possess a vinegary tang and confrontational call. Here’s a snippet from Sorkin’s introduction:

 

...I have never hesitated to call architects on doing work that is inimical to justice, whether that work is the displacement of living communities, window dressing for repressive regimes or toxic ideologies, the medium of imprisonment and surveillance, or the distributor of ill-gotten gains. And, by extension, I’ve been intolerant of the criticism and theorizing that abets all this.

 

Notice how his last sentence saves the quote from boilerplate Sermon-on-the-Left sermonizing. In fact, Sorkin is a moralizing critic, with all the pluses and minuses that accrue from that stance. His non-stop dissing of Philip Johnson, which even Sorkin characterizes as “a bushel of diatribes,” illuminates nothing of Johnson’s designs so much as ripping apart Johnson’s personality and politics. And he does the same to Daniel Libeskind. When he departs from argumentum ad hominem and critiques the design and not the designer, he shines. For example, here’s Sorkin writing about Rem Koolhass’s boutique for Prada in New York’s SoHo:

 

The main architectural move is sectional, a wooden wave that dips from the first floor to the basement and back, providing seating and a display surface for shoes. The wave is the Koolhausian portmanteau metaphor and his logo for multinationalism, his “site.” The architect’s a surfer, the cool individualist who rides but does not pretend to tame the massive hydraulics of the system.

 

This is a bit of finely-detailed elegant description – but far more. Sorkin’s description glides into thorough design critique by penetrating Koolhaas’s guiding metaphor infusing the boutique’s design. This perceptivity about the signature metaphors guiding – and misdirecting – urban architecture moderates Sorkin’s potentially grating moral priggishness. It centers him in the role of critic as entertaining educator. Here he is in that role discussing Donald Trump’s “condominium-hotel”:

 

Like most Trump projects, the architecture, by Handel Architects, is merely bland, another glass box. Because of its size, however, it whimsically rescales the entire neighborhood, permanently marring the low roofscape that stretches downtown and culminates in the lower Manhattan skyline. It’s a view I take in every morning as I walk to work, and the new tower already constitutes an awful scar of the sky. As urbanism, it’s vandalism.

 

This is immensely memorable storytelling underscoring the importance of context in urban design. It will long linger in memory, calling up how new architecture insensitive to neighborhood aesthetic standards can long raise havoc.

 

When Sorkin praises with passion, which he wholeheartedly does in his sweeping yet well-tempered assessment of Thom Mayne’s architectural achievement, you’re given a lot of insights to diligently digest, more than often found in glossy coffee-table monographs. But I still hold that Sorkin’s genius is most evident when, as scam scanner, he gives us the deliciously detailed overview of the architectural equivalent of the emperor’s new attire. He says “no” so resoundingly that you rejoice with him when his “yes” resounds.

 

Norman Weinstein writes about architecture and design for Architectural Record, and is the author of “Words That Build” – an exclusive 21-part series published by ArchNewsNow.com – that focuses on the overlooked foundations of architecture: oral and written communication. He consults with architects and engineers interested in communicating more profitably; his webinars are available from ExecSense. He can be reached at nweinstein@q.com.

 

More by Weinstein:

 

A Meditation on the Beauty of Zaha Hadid's Door Handle

Hadid's design issues a challenge: define beauty by lyrically playing with illusion.

 

Why "Greatest Hits" Lists by Architecture's Stars Should Be Mocked 
Transferring the musical or cinematic "greatest hits" list mind-set to architecture is deleterious, and here's why.

 

Celebratory Meditations on SANAA Winning the Pritzker Prize

 

Op-Ed: Life After Ada: Reassessing the Utility of Architectural Criticism 
Ada Louise Huxtable deserves mucho thanks and praise - but other questions moving us to a new flavor of criticism have to be asked.

 

Book Review: Pencils that Refuse to Die: Meditations about New Books on Architectural Drawing 
Three recent books dealing with architectural drawing by pencil you need to read: "Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect's Imagination" by Marco Frascari; "The Architect's Sketchbook" by Will Jones; and "Robbie Cornelissen: The Capacious Memory" by Lex ter Braak and Edwin Jacobs

 

Book Review: "One Million Acres & No Zoning": Lars Lerup's Outrageous Encomium to Houston Instructs and Infuriates 
This isn't some dryly academic reconfiguration of trendy urban planning theory. I recommend it for the intrepid.

 

Book Review: Talkin' 'Bout (Not) My Generation: Uplifting Gen X Architects Showcase Pragmatic Optimism 
In "New York Dozen: Gen X Architects" by architect Michael J. Crosbie, the framing of each architectural firm is extraordinary.

 

"Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum": Bravura Example of an Architectural Documentary - Wright's Guggenheim Done Right 
A look at great architecture as the product of the dance of the designer's intellect in an architectural film that doesn't miss a beat.

 

Book Review: A Shout Out for Leers Weinzapfel Associates: "Made to Measure" - Some Meditations on Rejuvenating Campus Architecture

 

Book Review: Diving into Architecture from Every New Angle: Reading Guillevic's "Geometries" 
Why an obscure book of French poetry in a flashy translation goes to the heart of every architectural practice.

 

Book Review: "Immaterial World: Transparency in Architecture": Marc Kristal crystallizes increasingly complex notions of transparency with a light touch. 
Although most of the 25 projects discussed are well-known, they take on additional meaning in this sensitively curated selection. 

 

Book Review: "Visual Planning and the Picuresque" by Nikolaus Pevsner. Edited by Mathew Aitchison 
A rediscovered manuscript unveils a portrait of the famed architectural historian as neglected urban designer. His commitment to the picturesque aesthetic for buildings and towns is as urgently needed as ever.

 

Book Review: How New Urbanism's Case Triumphs Best Through "The Language of Towns & Cities: A Visual Dictionary" by Dhiru A. Thadani 
Thadani's oversized reference charms, infuriates, and enlightens.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2010 
Ten books pointing the way to larger professional horizons

 

Book Review: "Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship": Yael Reisner exuberantly interviews architects about beauty 
Any of you architects seen Mr. Keats Lately?

 

Book Review: Shedding Light on Concrete: Tadao Ando: Complete Works 1975-2010 by Philip Jodidio 
Photographic presentation of a poet of light and concrete triumphs over lackluster commentary.

 

Book Review: Sage Architectural Reflections from Architecture's "Athena": Denise Scott Brown's "Having Words" distills a lifetime of theorizing and practice into practical and succinct guidance for thriving through difficult times 
Brown's occasional papers trace a trenchant trajectory of learning from Las Vegas to learning from everything.

 

Book Review: Keeping the Architectural Profession Professional: "Architecture from the Outside In: Selected Essays by Robert Gutman" celebrates Gutman's legacy as invaluable outsider
Selected essays by a penetrating sociologist of architecture pose the kinds of tough-minded questions needed now to keep architectural professional on-track.

 

Book Review: "Design through Dialogue: A Guide for Clients and Architects," by Karen A. Franck and Teresa von Sommaruga Howard 
A helpful communications primer offers case studies of winning collaborations between clients and architects, but as useful as this book proves, it leaves some uncomfortable questions about communication unaddressed.

 

Twilight Visions: Vintage Surrealist Photography Sheds New Light on Architecture 
An exhibition and book of photographs of Paris between the wars might just be the necessary correctives to the virtual sterility of digital imagery

 

Best Architecture Books of 2009 
10 crucial volumes from the classic to the iconoclastic

 

Book Review: "Gunnar Birkerts: Metaphoric Modernist" by Sven Birkerts and Martin Schwartz

A major architect in the history of Modernism finally receives recognition – and sundry asides about why Modernism never exited.

 

Book Review: "Urban Design for an Urban Century: Placemaking for People," by Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon, and Oliver Gillham 
To the credit of the erudite authors, their sketch of urban design brings levels of political, sociological, and architectural analysis together in a readable synthesis.

 

Book Review: "Everything Must Move: 15 Years at Rice School of Architecture 1994-2009" 
There’s a Texas flood of architectural ideas that gives ample evidence of an architecture school that unsettles pat assumptions. Who could ask for anything more?

 

Book Review: A Subversive Book Every Architect Needs: "Architect's Essentials of Negotiation" by Ava J. Abramowitz 
Supposedly architects don't need negotiating skills along with other communication skills because great design "sells itself." How lovely that an AIA legal counsel created this definitive book to shatter that thin myth.

 

Book Review: A Perspective from One Elevation: "Conversations With Frank Gehry" by Barbara Isenberg

Gehry's conversations offer portraits of an astute listener as well as talker, an architect as aware of his flaws and limitations as of his virtues.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2008 
10 tomes from the superior to the indispensable

 

Book Review: You've Got to Draw the Line Somewhere

A review of Drafting Culture: a Social History of Architectural Graphic Standards by George Barnett Johnston

 

Book Review: "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith," edited by Franklin Sirmans

Sharpen your pencils - and get ready to do a NeoHooDoo shimmy.