What Goes Up
The Right and Wrongs to the City
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- US$14.99
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- US$14.99
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A radical architect examines the changing fortunes of the contemporary city
Michael Sorkin is one of the most forthright and engaging architectural writers in the world. In What Goes Up he takes to task the public officials, developers, “civic” organizations, and other heroes of big money, who have made of Sorkin’s beloved New York a city of glittering towers and increasing inequality. He unpacks not simply the forms and practices—from zoning and political deals to the finer points of architectural design—that shape cities today but also offers spirited advocacy for another kind of city, reimagined from the street up on a human scale, a home to sustainable, just, and fulfilling neighborhoods and public spaces.
Informing his writing is a lifetime’s experience as an architect and urbanist. Sorkin writes of the joys and techniques of observing and inhabiting cities and buildings in order to both better understand and to more happily be in them. Sorkin has never been shy about naming names. He has been a scourge of design mediocrity and of the supine compliance of “starchitects,” who readily accede to the demands of greed and privilege. What Goes Up casts the net wide, as he directs his arguments to students, professionals, and urban citizens with vigor, expertise, respect, and barbed wit.
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In this collection of bracing, irreverent essays, most of which focus on New York City and are very short, Sorkin (The Next Jerusalem), professor of architecture and director of the graduate program in urban design at the City College of New York, tackles the moral and aesthetic questions arising from the urban built environment. He points up similarities between the Ground Zero memorial and gothic cathedrals, uses Occupy Wall Street as a jumping-off point to ask whether architecture can "live without capitalism," and calls out New York's first microapartments as "too small" for anyone other than "childless Zen masters and anal retentives." He argues that the spatial and the social are impossible to pry apart: "New York's... urbanism, for better or worse, is exactly one of negotiation, the architecture of the deal, and the deal is always between public and private interests.... The deck continues to be stacked against the public and the sum is never zero." In clever, energetic prose that bounces between the scholarly and the excitably conversational, Sorkin calls for specific changes that would increase affordable housing, speed the transition to carbon neutrality, and enact a commitment to equity for marginalized communities and, less predictably, for architects to remember "the feel of cool marble under bare feet." Sorkin's delight in architecture and public spaces suffuses this fierce and timely book.
