What Goes Up: The Right and Wrongs To the City

(Hardback)

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Description

Michael Sorkin is one of the most forthright and engaging architectural writers in the world. In What Goes Up he charts the dehumanising regimes of mayors Bloomberg and De Blasio that created a city of glittering towers and increasing inequality. He looks at what has happened to Ground Zero, as a place of memory has been reconstructed by "staritects" and turned into malls. The city, he suggests, has to be reimagined from the street up on a human scale, to develop new ways to revitalise neighbourhoods. Alongside these essays on New York, Sorkin also brings his lifetimes experience as an architect to bear. He talks of the joy of observing a city in order to understand it. Why a young designer must learn to draw by hand rather than only use a computer. There are also personal encounters with some of the greatest names who have changed the city. Sorkin gets lost in Rio with Zaha Hadid; talks about the old Bronx with Marshall Berman; and gets on the wrong side of Daniel Libeskind.

Reviews

Praise for Sorkin: Easily one of the best architecture critics around ... Sorkin is a flaneur with a sense of public purpose. -- Chris Hall * Guardian *
Praise for Sorkin: America's most invigorating writer on architecture. * Observer *
Praise for Sorkin: Sorkin is a formidable opponent of the banal, the ugly, the stupid and the vapidly posturing which, he argues, are all around us. * Publishers Weekly *

Author Bio

Michael Sorkin is an award-winning architect and Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York. In 2010, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in architecture. For ten years, Sorkin was architecture critic for the The Village Voice, and he has written for Architectural Record, The New York Times, The Architectural Review, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, Architectural Review, and the Nation. His books include Exquisite Corpses, After the World Trade Center, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan and All Over the Map.