n+1: Precise and Prescient, On Michael Sorkin
Sarah Abdallah
by Thomas de Monchaux and Mark Krotov
Michael Sorkin Studio, Atlanta City Center Proposal, 1986
ARE COVID-19 OBITUARIES all we’re going to be writing and publishing for the next few months? To my shame I’ve never seen a Terrence McNally play, have never listened to Manu Dibango or Aurlus Mabele, don’t think I’ve ever read Maurice Berger. Which means that Michael Sorkin, who died on Thursday, is, for me, the pandemic’s first celebrity victim, to the extent that an architecture critic can be a celebrity. He was 71.
I would like to avoid imagining Sorkin’s final moments in—I presume—a chaotic, overcrowded New York hospital, but in a Covid-19 obituary there is no peaceful end to conjure, no comforting, mitigating cliché. This is not a moment to take peaceful stock of a life lived to the fullest.
Sorkin died needlessly, at the hands of a monstrous President he diagnosed better than most back in the summer of 2016, when too many of us dismissed analogy as overstatement. Sorkin began writing for the Village Voice in the late ’70s, his office was up the street from Trump SoHo, and his beat was architecture, money, power, fascism. Of course he understood. And yet: “it isn’t the architecture that makes the man dangerous.” Better, always better, to avoid the metaphor and state things plainly:
An ironic staple of current cocktail chatter: Was it like this in Berlin in 1932? That fool will never become chancellor. The bombast, the racism, the mustache—impossible. Of course, the comparison goes too far, doesn’t it? Demonizing Muslims is very different from demonizing Jews. And the plan is to keep them out, not throw them out, right? It’s the 11 million Mexicans we actually want to deport, and they’re all criminals. And we’re going to build great things: walls as wide as a country and as long as the autobahn. That sound we hear is the glass ceiling shattering, not Kristallnacht.
Isn’t it?
That was how that column ended…..