Articles by Michael Sorkin

The Chinese have a longstanding genius for domestic architecture, and a visit to the hutong of Beijing—the fast-disappearing neighborhoods of courtyard houses, laced with small lanes and commerce, sanctuaries of both intimacy and variety in the midst of a city too rapidly doing away with the best of its public character—affirms the singularity and brilliance of their historic accomplishment. Such places offer an alternative vision to the Modernist constructs that shape the city today and provide an irreplaceable element in the urban repertoire that demands not simply to be conserved but extended. Photo © Clifford Pearson Hutong are places of

“I do like the grandiose.” I had been to China frequently, but somehow, until a few months ago, never to Beijing. Like many cities in China, it’s intimidatingly vast and growing like Topsy. Unlike other cities, though, it is laid out with an orthogonal monumentality, with vast boulevards, widely spaced buildings, and a thick aura of imperium. Photos © Clifford Pearson Walls, courtyards, and lanes of different sizes define both the residential areas of the Forbidden City (top) and the common hutong (above). The prototype for the city as a whole is the famous Forbidden City, described by Marco Polo

Checking out the goodies Okay. Enough of this self-righteous rant. What about the architecture? There is some marvelous work. Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada is striking at the scale of the cityscape, jutting appealingly just above its roofline context. The diamond-gridded structural wall, with its mix of bubbled and flush glass panels, is a lovely thing, and the interior is luminous and dramatic. Circulation is suave, carpet is white, clerks are impeccable in gray. At Tod’s down the row, Ito claims inspiration from the angularity of the branches of the trees out front and creates a facade of big, irregular

The cherry blossoms were at their peak on a Thursday in late March when I went for a stroll in Ueno Park in Tokyo. A nimbus of white glowing pink with dramatic dark branches etched through it floated above the crowds strolling, photographing, and picnicking on blue tarps spread beneath the trees. What could be more Japanese than such civic reverence for this short-lived phenomenon in all its tender aesthetic frailty? Of course, everyone’s behavior was exemplary, not a scrap of litter and no one disrespecting the pedestrian flow. Photo © Christian Richters (top); Jimmy Cohrssen (above) Herzog & de

Green camouflage In listening to one very well attended public presentation by the designers of the five schemes, I noticed another interesting form of misdirection. We are all greatly attuned to matters green nowadays, and each of the teams pressed that component to the fore, often with the landscape architect most prominently featured in making the case. (By the way, the Bloomberg administration has, under Doctoroff’s direction, produced what is, in many ways, a very impressive plan for the city’s sustainable growth, which is clearly having at least a rhetorical impact.) The evening was filled with talk of microclimates and

New York’s powerful deputy mayor for economic development, Dan Doctoroff, recently resigned, something that had been rumored for a time. Doctoroff, who came to the city from a master-of-the-universe career as a private equity dealer, has left—with scarcely a murmur of disapproval—to become head of Bloomberg L.P., the Mayor’s very own multibillion-dollar financial reporting company. While there is apparently nothing illegal about this, it does affirm once again the degree of control of the city by an interlocking directorate of government, finance, and real estate–development interests, and the tendency of players to move seamlessly from one sector to another. This

One obvious question is why Trump and his partners aren’t simply building an actual hotel on the site. According to Julius Schwarz, executive vice president of the Bayrock Group (which initially secured the site with the Sapir Organization before bringing in Trump for his inimitable cachet) and the managing partner for the project, “It’s a financing mechanism” designed as a hedge against a potential glut of hotels. “You can model it out 10 years. Right now, there’s a shortage of hotels. So people are going to be building hotels and the rates will eventually come down. Hotel rooms will always

The form of the city rises from the convergence of legislation, imagination, ambition, and resistance. This complex of forces is getting a workout a few blocks from my office in Lower Manhattan, where Donald Trump and partners are building the Trump SoHo, a 45-story “condominium hotel” containing 400 apartments—ranging in size from 425 to 10,000 square feet—priced at $3,000 a square foot and said to be selling briskly. The tower, which is going up fast and is scheduled to open in spring 2009, sits adjacent to SoHo and will be, by far, the tallest building in an area characterized by

Spaces of free access The contraction of the public realm, however, extends beyond these Orwellian developments. Public space is produced from the private: In democracy, the commons is always a compact about what is to be shared, what reserved; about where we choose to interact with the other. There’s been a lot of criticism from certain academic quarters about traditional notions of public space, about overidentifying the idea with streets, squares, parks, and other historic settings for face-to-face interactions. This critique is predicated both on the idea that these spaces fail to acknowledge the existence of multiple publics and that

As part of his recently released plan for New York by the year 2030, entitled PLANYC: A Greener, Greater New York, Mayor Michael Blooomberg is actively promoting a scheme for congestion pricing in the busiest parts of Manhattan. Modeled on programs in Singapore, London, and Stockholm, the system is intended to curb vehicular traffic (and raise money for public transportation) by imposing charges ($8 for cars and $21 for trucks) to enter the borough below 96th Street. The proposal has the support of virtually every bien-pensant urbanist in town, although it has met some resistance, particularly from the outer boroughs