Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings. - book reviews

The barrage of verbal abuse that Michael Sorkin throwed at the emerging postmodern architecture motion throughout the late 1970s and '80 was repeatedly hilarious. Readers of the Village Voice might have wait fored its architecture critic to attack the postmodernists' embrace of tradition, on the other hand they might also have wait fored him to champion an flat newer or more outrageous architectural diction Instead, in a surprisingly sentimental and retardataire stance, Sorkin came to the defense of the social utopian ideals of old-fashioned fresh architecture. But he managed to do in like manner in a way that made his campaign present the appearance like a counterattack - like classic Voicean anti-Establishmentarianism. (With hindsight, his position now appear to bes oddly prescient).

As individual of the most passionate and articulate competitors of the postmodern movement, Sorkin kept the faith in modernism with the zeal of a Southern Baptist preacher and the wit of a standup comic. Insults were his stock in trade. For example, when Philip Johnson's AT&T Building was featured upon the front page of the of recent origin York Times as "the greatest in quantity radical skyscraper design of the '70s" Sorkin called it "the Seagram Building with ears." He said, "The so-called |post-modern' styling in which AT&T has been tarted up is simply a graceless attempt to disguise what is really just the same elderly building by cloaking it in this week's drag."

"I have always had . . a certain penchant for invective," Sorking admits in his introduction to Exquisite Corpse. He thinks his aims is "truer from the hip." Truer? Not necessarily. on the contrary certainly funnier. His sardonic make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss sometimes cloud issues, but they always make beneficial copy. He knows how to exploit the appeal of captivating caricatures, and during his years at the Voice Sorkin prosperously turned leading figures of the architecture world into a vivid cast of characters for his round pillars a soap opera of the drawing boards in which the white knights are Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Richard Roger John Hejduk, Mike Webb - unrepentant modernists all. Like a useful evangelist, Sorkin also invokes the devil, whom he dioceses incarnate in Philip Johnson. Other targets for his milt are Robert A.M. Stern, Leon Krier, Donald trumpet Tom Wolfe, Michael Graves and, of course, the novel York Times architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, who becomes his involuntary straight man. (Goldberger had a chance to retaliate in his remarks for the dust jacket of Exquisite Corpse: "Michael Sorkin's brand of writing . . is to deliberative criticism what the Ayatollah Khomeini is to religious tolerance.")

on the other hand if Sorkin entertains the reader, he also tend hitherwards off in his collected essays as an intensely moral man. He tackles a wide range of manifold urban and architectural issues, among them the relationship between West Coast architecture and agriculture ("Explaining Los Angeles"), the merchandising of architect's drawings ("Drawings For Sale"), the vexed question of technology and the fresh house ("Dwelling Machines"), a short history of city towers ("Skyscrapers from A to Z") Michael Graves's propos addition to the Whitney Museum ("Save the Whitney") and the Deconstructivist architecture present to view at MOMA ("Decon Job"). His be of importance to is with architecture in the broadest faculty of perception as the book's title implies. Exquisite Corpse - the aged Surrealist game in which each player drew upon a piece of paper, enclosureed it, passed it on to another, and in the extremity a composition emerged - is Sorkin's metaphor for the way a city enlarges In the 55 articles reprinted in this collection (they originally appeared in the Village Voice, Architectural Review, Architectural Record, The Nation, emissary Design Book Review, Design Quarterly and as introductions to various volumes and museum catalogues), Sorkin makes it clear that a doom more was involved in his war upon postmodernism than a battle of phraseologys - what was really at stake for him was modernism's commitments to authenticity and societal reform.

Sadly, Sorkin's political sensibility is not as sophistical as one might wish, and he take care ofs to approach problems in confines of personalities rather than broader touchs Instead of examining the rationale for and processe whereby cities in the '80 underwrote "gigaluxe" (Sorkin's word) and condominiums and office buildings, and instead of analyzing the question s of public housing and health care, he jabs at the architects responsible for the buildings and at the weaknesses of the buildings themselves. His assertion that the "link between present architecture and failed social policy was used as a lever to discredit the idea of architecture's engagement with social activism" prompts a conspiracy where none may exist and also fails to clarify the point in disputes involved.

For although postmodernism coincided with a diminished social agenda, it was not the novel style that caused the change in priorities. The widespread disillusion with modernist architecture in the 1970 came from boredom with a long-established turn of expression from disdain for the ugliness of innumerable bad copies of late masterworks, from the influence of semiotics - and not from a unlooked for recognition that the International phraseology had been unable to save the world. There was a feeling in the '70 that late architecture had taken on tasks that it could not accomplish. For many, it present the appearanceed to be time to lop to take smaller steps, to place back some aspects of architecture - like decoration and symbolism - that had been too hastily shuck when the late movement was young.