Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know

Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know

by Michael Sorkin
Princeton Architectural Press, November 2021

Hardcover | 5 x 7 inches | 144 pages | English | ISBN: 9781648960802 | $19.95

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

From iconic architect and critic Michael Sorkin comes a joyful celebration of architecture and city-making, told through his famous list, in one beautiful, illustrated book.

Equal parts poetic, practical, playful, and wise, Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know presents a compelling and perceptive list of essential knowledge that Michael Sorkin composed during his renowned career as an architect, urbanist, critic, and force for justice and equity in design. In this first posthumous collection of Sorkin's work, entries are paired with 100 poignant and elegant color and black-and-white photographs, illustrations, and archival images. The handsome, foil-stamped cover and timeless design makes this the perfect gift for architects, students of architecture, and design-savvy urbanists.

Michael Sorkin (1948-2020) was an architect, urbanist, teacher, writer, and critic, who authored numerous articles and books. He was principal of Michael Sorkin Studio in New York City, president of the nonprofit Terreform, director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at City College of New York (CCNY), and architecture critic for the Village Voice. He remained an outspoken critic of misguided architecture, urban inequality, oppressive ideologies, and other impediments to truly egalitarian and sustainable societies his whole life.

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dDAB COMMENTARY:

First published in 2014 in Educating Architects: How Tomorrow's Practitioners Will Learn Today and then more widely in the 2018 collection What Goes Up: The Right and Wrongs to the City, Michael Sorkin's "Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know" is just what it sounds like: a list of 250 things that architects should know. It starts with "the feel of cool marble under bare feet" and ends with "the golden and other ratios," but there is no apparent rhyme or reason to the order of the 248 things in between, outside of some clusters of similarly minded things, such as "the pleasures of the suburbs" (#76, visible in the fourth spread, below) and "the horrors" immediately following it. The list has been copy/pasted online into what I'm guessing are dozens of places, such as the Reading Design website, but best I can tell it wasn't until last year and Pentagram's 2020 holiday greeting that someone tried to put images alongside the list of things, in that case red-and-black line drawings by Chris DeLorenzo. Now, a year later, Princeton Architectural Press is putting out another posthumous publication of Sorkin's influential list, this time pairing his words with photos, drawings, and other images across 144 pages.

Sorkin, who I studied under in the Urban Design program at City College of New York, was known for the scathing critiques of architecture and urbanism in What Goes Up and other books that gathered his essays from the Village Voice, Architectural Record, The Nation, and other outlets. But Michael (as I knew him and still think of him) was a much more diverse writer, even putting out a book-length urban code, Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42 degrees North Latitude, and later producing the 250-strong list of advice for future architects. Yet, just as I doubt many architecture students designed projects based on Sorkin's Local Code, it's unlikely that many students and young architects have attempted to fulfill each of the 250 things, regardless of how easy or enticing some of them may be ("Walk on cool marble? Check"). Of the two, the "250 Things" is clearly much more fun.

The way the list of things architects should know jumps around in terms of subject (history, phenomenology, urbanism, etc.), as mentioned above, is one of the most appealing aspects of the list. The items are not ranked but they are numbered, which pushes one to read them in order. Doing so means bouncing around from one seemingly unrelated thing to another: from "Sentence structure" to "The pleasure of a spritz at sunset at a table by the Grand Canal" (#92 and #93); from "QWERTY" to "Fear" (#131 and #132); or from "How to give directions, efficiently and courteously" (I love the addition of the last word) to "Stadtluft macht frei" (#209 and #210). Occasionally, as also mentioned above, things in the list coincide, such as when "How to turn a corner" is followed by "How to design a corner," which is in turn followed by "How to sit in a corner." These intermittent clusters give the long list a subtle undulating rhythm, but they also give PAPress opportunities to structure their visual version of Sorkin's list.

At first flip I found the selection of images in the book, though diverse, a bit too much of a departure from the visuals I often associate with Sorkin, like the collages of Godzilla or any of the wiggly drawings that made the name of his solo monograph so spot-on. But how do a photo of a steaming teapot, a drawing of flowers, or an etching of a printing press (second spread) align with the progressive, antagonistic Michael Sorkin? Clearly the images relate more to the listed items than the author and educator who compiled them. "The pleasure of the suburbs," for instance, sits alone on the page opposite a photo of a family together in front of a modern ranch house; flipping the page reveals "The horrors" and an aerial view of tightly packed cookie-cutter houses. Although the latter was originally written with ellipses ("...the horrors") to clearly link the two things, in this book the images do that job. Some images reinforce the fun and spontaneous nature of the list, as in a photo of a woman hanging on to a light pole opposite "Which way the wind blows" (#203) and a phallic cactus opposite "Freud" (#235). My favorite bits of advice are what one could call life experiences over learning, like in the spritz in Venice or "Finding your way around Prague, Fez, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Kyoto, Rio, Mexico, Solo, Benares, Bangkok, Leningrad, Isfahan" (#133) or "Good beer" (#129), the last of which I was fortunate enough to share with Michael on more than one occasion.

I'll be giving away a copy of Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know in my newsletter going out Sunday, October 31. Sign up for the newsletter here for a chance to win.

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