""This is the most brilliant epitome of Manhattan ever written." --Mike Davis Every morning, the architect and writer Michael Sorkin walks from his apartment in Greenwich Village to his office in Tribeca. Unlike most commuters, Sorkin isn't in a hurry, and he doesn't try to drown out his surroundings. Instead, he's always paying attention. As he descends the narrow stairs of his town house, Sorkin explains why New York doesn't have the grand stairwells so common in European apartment buildings. Stepping out onto his block, he imagines a better, more efficient, far less dirty way to dispose of garbage. As he crosses Canal Street, he remembers the mad proposals for tunnels, elevated highways, and mega-structures that threatened lower Manhattan and could have destroyed its urban fabric. Fifty years after Jane Jacobs's groundbreaking The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Sorkin's vision of city life is every bit as perceptive and fine-grained as that of Jacobs's classic. With important insights into history, architecture, and public policy, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is an extraordinary, deeply personal look at a city undergoing--always undergoing--dramatic transformations"--

Architect and social critic Michael Sorkin develops his own vision of the future lower Manhattan through a series of chronologically organized essays illustrated with full-color images of his own plans. Mixing his inimitable brand of social criticism with more personal reflections, Starting From Zero offers a striving challenge to the Ground Zero redevelopment plan recently chosen by New York's establishment insiders.

Robert Hughes once described Michael Sorkin as “unique in America––brave, principled, highly informed and fiercely funny.” All Over the Map confirms all of these superlatives as Sorkin assaults “the national security city, with its architecture of manufactured fear.”

Architect, writer, teacher--and agent provocateur--Michael Sorkin was commissioned by the University of Chicago in 1998 to produce an "alternative" master plan for its architectural revitalization. His studio had barely begun before they were dropped from the process. In the capacity of concerned alumnus, however, Sorkin and his group soldiered on and, in Pamphlet Architecture 22, present their background studies and proposed schemes, shown here in models and colorful drawings.This critical analysis of the official plans adopted by the University juxtaposed against Sorkin's "Other Plans" provides concrete evidence of his visionary ideals and what remarkable architecture and planning mean today.

The first complete volume on the multifaceted architecture and design projects of the Michael Sorkin Studio. Many of the projects are theoretical and experimental and come to fruition through the drawings, models, exhibitions, writings, and installations shown in the book. Sorkin provides his own commentary, discussing the goals of each project, the influences on it, and the research and design process, as well as its architectural, social, and political statement. The book is a record of Sorkins ambition to reinvent architecture.