Settlements After Now
Michael Sorkin

Human settlements are products of human behavior: the record of settlement-building encodes generative patterns that reveal the complex of intentions and resources of their builders. Today, however, these originating circumstances often no longer obtain, confusing our own conflations of form and desire. As older patterns increasingly serve to focus and represent our architectural and social aspirations, this disengagement from contemporaneity becomes more and more problematic. Indeed, in the homogenizing atmosphere of globalized culture, retrospection has become our paramount value in both observing the city and in speculating about its future, yielding forms that are increasingly distanced from their originating contexts of meaning.

Given the complex of social, psychical, technical, cultural, environmental, and economic changes that confront the planet, where can meaningful ideas of prospective difference be found? How can the vital idea of locality confront this winnowed ground of particularity? Using the example of my own urbanistic work, I will speculate about two primary (but hardly exhaustive) sources for the invention of fresh differences in urban form. The first is a restudied appreciation of the bio-climatic environment that grows from a more nuanced understanding of our own role in the production of "nature." The second is the insistence on the importance of more purely artistic strategies as a means of research into possible futures for human settlements. Given the enormity and swiftness of current transformations, this search for new forms is vital both as a practical matter and as a means of interrogating received wisdom about the importance of our historic styles of propinquity.

Michael Sorkin, is the principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio in New York City, a design practice devoted to both practical and theoretical projects at all scales with a special interest in the city. Recent projects include masterplanning in Hamburg and Schwerin, Germany, planning for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, campus planning at the University of Chicago, and studies of the Manhattan waterfront. The studio is the recipient of a variety of awards, including three I.D. Awards and a Progressive Architecture Award.

Sorkin has recently been appointed Professor of Architecture and Director of the graduate urban design program at New York's City College. From 1993 to 2000, he was Professor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and has held professorships at numerous schools of architecture including Cooper Union, Columbia, Yale (holding both Davenport and Bishop Chairs), Harvard, Cornell (Gensler Chair), Nebraska (Hyde Chair), Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Minnesota.

Sorkin lectures widely and is the author of many articles in a wide range of both professional and general publications and is currently contributing editor at Architectural Record, I.D., and Metropolis. For ten years, he was the architecture critic of The Village Voice. His books include Variations on A Theme Park, Exquisite Corpse, Local Code, Giving Ground (edited with Joan Copjec), and Wiggle, a monograph of the studio's work. Forthcoming are Some Assembly Required, Weed, AZ., The Next Jerusalem, and Urbanagrams.

Michael Sorkin was born in Washington, D.C. and received his architectural training at Harvard and MIT.

Michael Sorkin Studio:
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