Michael Sorkin Studio

| Michael Sorkin (*1948) | Andrei Vovk (*1958)

Hallowe'en reminded me of Michael Sorkin
Two kids came to our door trick or treating, stepped into our house and looked around. One kid asked me why we had a christmas tree. Before I could reply the other kid said, "it's not a christmas tree, it's a Hallowe'en tree. You have to use your imagination." Hallowe'en is a time filled with expectations of simultaneous fear and fantasy. A time when one's consciousness of the ironic nature of life's events, places, people, and things serves to inspire the mind to great leaps of imagination. "Ordinary" people reinvent themselves into extraodinary representations of far-fetched things from static-cling to the Daughters of the American Revolution. Anything and everything is subject to reinterpretation, transformation, and reconfiguration. A twenty-four hour blast of freedom to invent without fear end reproach. Magically, the darkest and brightest sides of human endeavor and thought are brought into a universally acceptable condition of equilibrium. Horror equals joy, death lives, pumpkins smile, and skeletons dance. Michael Sorkin's view of the world might be described as a Hallowe'enistic reality chek. He sees things exactly as they are. He makes and describes things with an yelsing honesty. He concerns himself with serious matters of the future of our world environment and social and political order. His proposals are at once full of irony and a delightful sense of humor. His solutions require horrifyingly difficult yet strikingly simplistic action. He operates with a mind-set more inclined toward the goofy world of Popular Mechanics than Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture. Architects of lesser skill, talent, and knowledge with similar tendencies would undoubtedly slip into the less relevant world of the idiosyncratic. Michael Sorkin, however, continues to impress with his uncanny ability to strike fear in the hearts of the intelligentsia and fantasy in the minds of the banal.

Mack Scogin

This spectaculary sited island (Upper Bay of New York) has been remaidered by the Coast Guard and is currently up for grabs. Clearly, the future of the island is going to get brokered as a deal. These studies are not specific about exact activities save that they be dense and public. Actually, Sorkin have been gone through various schemes and in the end decided that a "University of the Earth" devoted to environmental science and policy would make a fine project, the island in the harbor standing in for the planet's own situation in the universe. In addition, it seemed appropriate to include a variety of water-related and recreational uses as part of the mix. The round buildings are brick-walled lofts, inspired by the circular fortress across the water at the Battery and its angular companion on the island. These loft buildings have hollow cores over which domes would grow during the winter to allow continuous use. The island has been slightly reshaped, recalling its origins as fill.

Weed, AZ
Near Yuma (Californie), USA, 1994

Weed, AZ, is a proposal for a small new city that grew out of an investigation of the possibilities for conversion of the American military economy. Located on an existing artificial lake creating by a dam on the Colorado River, Weed occupies a small piece of territory appropriated from the enormous Yuma Proving Ground and adjoins a large irrigated agricultural area. The town is dimensioned by bearing capacity and character of the land, by proximity to the water, and by neighborhood structure loosely configured to a ten-minute walking radius. A serie of intersecting, branching spines provides pedestrian streets, an element of order, and surfaces for different style of movement, including a slow-motion public transit system. Automobiles are relegated to the periphery of the city. Weed is just one look at a new kind of city, located at a particular convergence of landscape, culture, technology, and architecture. Dense and pedestrian, laced with water and greenery, Weed seeks to offer non-coercive variety, spaces to support activities both predictable and unenvisioned.

House for a Near Future
Projet expérimental, 1998

This proposal is for an experimental house for thirty people, a small community sharing resources and environment. The basic unit is a double space, two sheltering elements that share water and waste management, energy production, and a social space. From this kernel the larger house grows and form these houses larger communities might also develop, finding their form according to the living arrangements desired by their in-habitants. The future house will be very selective about its technologies, embracing both the most advanced and the most traditional. Constructed of soybean-derived plastic panels cast to form an infinite variety of shapes, glazed with aerogel windows that can be made transparent or opaque at the turn of a dial, generating its own power from photovoltaics and hydro, and treating its own wastes through green "living machine" technology, the house is in peace with its rural setting. Located on a net of slow moving solar, hydrogen, and human powered vehicles, it sits easily in its local setting, completely connected to the world.

Shrooms Housing
New York, USA, 1994

The genesis of Shrooms is in the idea of an "all-sided" loft building in East New York neighborhood, characterized by extensive abandonment and vacant land, much of it city-owned. Looking at the empty lots not as blight but as a community resource, Sorkin hoped that a growing garland of Shrooms might help in both greening and rebuilding the neighborhood. In addition, he thought of the loft type as crucial protopublic space where innumerable private possibilities might be drawn. Rejecting the modernist notion of public space as disembo-died and universal, Shrooms is an investigation of the reciprocities of public and private rather than an essay in their disjunction. As an urban proposition, Shrooms seeks to esta-blish a new pattern of movement through the neighborhood. These public greenways lead to the green rooms at the core of each structure, form blossoms that act as distributors for the loft spaces that surround them. The system of green and publicly aggrandizable spaces emerges on the roofs of the Shrooms as a linked system of gardens, a vertical displa-cement of the ground plane, a return to collective use.

Michael Sorkin (1948)
Diplômé d'Harvard University et du Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Andrei Vovk (1958)

Enseignement

Michael Sorkin

2000 - Professeur d'Urbanisme et Directeur de l'Institut d'Urbanisme de l'Academy of Fine Arts à Vienne ; Directeur du Graduate Urban Design Program au New York's City College Michael Sorkin a également été professeur à Cooper Union, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Cornell…

Principaux projets et réalisations

1999 – "East Jerusalem" plan pour une capitale palestinienne (projet) ; "University of Chicago" aménagement du campus (concours) ; "Schwerin" Allemagne, masterplan (projet)

1998 – "House for a Near Future" (projet expérimental) ; "Hambourg" Allemagne, masterplan (projet)

1997 – "Bay City Studies" masterplan pour une portion du front de mer, San Francisco (projet) ; "Chavez Ravine" parc public autour du Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles (projet) ; "Floating Islands" commande publique, Hambourg, Allemagne (projet) ; "Friedrichshof Commune" projet urbain, Burgenland, Autriche ;

1996 – "Governors Island" masterplan (concours) ; "Bucharest 2020" projet urbain (concours) ; "Neurasia" prospective urbaine

1995 – "Wagga Wagga" centre civique, New South Wales, Australie (concours) ; "Turtle Portable Puppet Theater" (projet)

1994 – "Weed AZ" projet de ville nouvelle, Yuma, Arizona ; "Shrooms" lofts "multi-face" East New York (projet) ; "Brooklyn Waterfront" masterplan pour une portion du front de mer, New York (projet) ; "Mondo Condo" Miami, Floride (projet) ; "Shoehaus" logements, Vienne, Autriche (projet) ; "Souks de Beyrouth" (concours)

1991 – "Berlin Spreebogen" (concours) ; "New York City" logements (projet) ; "Beached Houses" Whitehouse, Jamaïque (projet)

1990 – "Tour Godzilla" Tokyo, Japon ; "Tracked Houses" maisons sur rails, New York (projet)

Expositions récentes

1995/96 – "Urbanagrams" Harvard University et Cornell University

1995 – "Subjects & Objects" San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

1994 – "World War II and the American Dream" National Building Museum, Washington

Principales publications de Michael Sorkin

1998 – "Michael Sorkin Studio : Wiggle" éditions The Monacelli Press, New York

1992 – "Variations on a Theme Park" éditions Will & Hang, New York

– Michael Sorkin est également l'auteur de "Exquisite Corpse" ; "Local Code" ; "Giving Ground" avec Joan Copsec ; il collabore à de nombreuses revues généralistes, mais aussi spécialisées dont Architectural Record, I.D., Metropolis. Il a été, durant 10 ans, le critique d'architecture du Village Voice, USA