Architect, urbanist, educator and fierce architecture critic Michael Sorkin passed away yesterday at the age of 71 in New York. Sorkin’s nonprofit research studio Terreform brings out the sad news today.
Sorkin graduated from MIT in ‘74 and founded Michael Sorkin Studio that predominantly worked on worldwide urban planning projects. The office designed urban planning projects for Hamburg, East Jerusalem, New York and most recently an award-winning masterplan for a new town of 300,000 inhabitants in Wuhan.
He held positions at Yale, Harvard, Cooper Union, Cornell, the AA and many more institutions. As an architecture critic he wrote for publications like Architectural Record, The New York Times, The Architectural Review, Metropolis, Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal and Architectural Review. He is known for journalistic articles that defend the importance of uncompromising public space.
