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ALL OVER THE MAP
Writing on Buildings and Cities
MICHAEL SORKIN
Dedication
To my students
Contents
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
1 The Second-Greatest Generation
2 Herb’s Content
3 Notes on a Tennessee Town
4 After the Fall
5 What Remains
6 First Response
7 The Center Cannot Hold
8 Six Months
9 Thinking Inside the Box
10 The Dimensions of Aura
11 The World Peace Dome
12 The Lotus
13 Security
14 A Brief for Reconstruction
15 Riff on Rem
16 Herbert’s List
17 Splitsville, USA: Why the Practice and Teaching of Urban Design Is Coming Apart
18 Urbanism Is Politics
19 On SITE
20 Who Decides?
21 No Island Is an Island
22 Obstructed Vision
23 Remembering Doug Michels
24 The Avant-Garde in Time of War
25 And Then There Were Two
26 Density Noodle
27 Caveat Competitor
28 (S)Truth and Consequences
29 Entering the Building
30 Urban Warfare: A Tour of the Battlefield
31 Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Cars, Dolphins, and Architecture
32 Displacement
33 Crippled in the City
34 The Limits of Tolerance
35 When Good Architects Design Bad Buildings
36 Advice to Critics
37 Liberty Square
38 Bush in Space
39 Architecture and Revolution
40 What Can You Say About The Pritzker?
41 A Trip to Tijuana
42 Seven Chairs
43 A Letter to Bob
44 Into the Woods
45 Cardinal Points
46 My Last Philippic
47 Gulf States
48 People Who Live in Urban Glass Houses
49 Ten Better Places for a Football Stadium
50 Finding a Dramatic Home for a Political Football
51 The Great Mall of New York
52 The Bounding Mayne
53 Drowning in the Gulf Again
54 Sincerely, Jane Jacobs
55 Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?
56 Stuyvesant Town
57 How I Invented Asia
58 Everybody’s a Critic!
59 Go Down Moses!
60 The Jungle Urban: Welcome to Petropolis
61 Trumped Again
62 Asian Alterity: What’s the Diference?
63 The End(s) of Urban Design
64 Big Brother Is Charging You
65 West Side Story
66 An Architectural Tourist on Omotesando
67 Learning from the Hutong of Beijing and Lilong of Shanghai
68 Covering the Territory: Three Films by Amos Gitai
69 Bucky and Me
70 Three Freedoms
71 The Plot against Architecture
72 A Letter to President Obama
73 A Cut through the City
74 Trouble in Paradise
75 Discipline and Punish
76 Eutopia Now!
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Books by Michael Sorkin
Preface
The majority of the pieces in this collection were first published in Architectural Record magazine and I’d like to thank Robert Ivy and Clifford Pearson for offering me a place to say pretty much what I chose for so many years. A couple of the longer essays appeared in the Harvard Design Magazine and I’m indebted to William Saunders for his staunch support and encouragement. Many of the 9/11-related pieces in this volume were collected in Starting from Zero and I’d like to give a shout out to the great Dave McBride, formerly of Routledge, who saw that volume through. (I did debate leaving these pieces out but the volume seemed wrong without them, and
