Scholar discusses need 'to innovate the city'

Mixing humor with personal anecdotes and fictional stories of architectural caveats, urbanism scholar Michael Sorkin delivered "a message about the necessity of trying to innovate the city" during a speech in Meyerson Hall Thursday night. Sorkin, director of the Urbanism Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, made his remarks during the third in a series of lectures sponsored by the Graduate School of Fine Arts. Sorkin expressed both a pessimistic and optimistic outlook for the current state of the city. "The reliability of time and space are utterly vexed," he said. "We are creating cities that lie to us. The authentic city has become a mendacity." He accused the modern urban scene of, among other things, the "Disney Syndrome," which he called, "the meaninglessness of the scene." Sorkin went on to charge the city with an "assault on the thing, on the beautiful palpabilities of stuff" and with "falsification of memory." Architecture has become "something that never was," he commented. "Every street is a movie set." Yet, said Sorkin, future potentials present an opportunity to rethink and redesign past mistakes. "It is a moment of unbelievable promise; time and space are graspable in new ways," he stated. "We are free to reimagine the basic structure of urbanism." Sorkin advocated variability, which he believes can be achieved through a melding of different approaches. "We get in trouble when we insist on homogeneity for design of the city," he stated. "We need a way of dealing with the city which is combination of readings." Sorkin then read from his own "Bill of Rights," part of a "building code" that he authored to outline the basics of urban construction. Among these rights are "the right to travel," "the right to safety" and "the right to free movement." Augmenting his talk with slides, Sorkin applied these ideals to sites in New York, Berlin and Tokyo, presenting his personal blueprints and plans. Sorkin has taught at Columbia and Harvard universities, as well as the University of Nebraska. A former critic for The Village Voice, Sorkin also manages his own architecture practice in New York City. Fine arts graduate student Alex Anderson offered both praise and criticism for Sorkin's ideas. "I think [he's] got a lot of good ideas about urban conditions," Anderson said. "But his projects are a little capricious."