Walk This Way

The other day in the Union Square Barnes and Noble I skimmed a good portion of the architect and critic Michael Sorkin’s new book, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan. It’s a quick read, but energetic and enjoyable — a memoir of his morning commute from his West Village walk-up to his TriBeCa studio, seen through the detail-oriented eye of someone who knows how to read buildings and neighborhoods, day-by-day and decade-by-decade.

ArtForum recently published a quickie interview with Sorkin by the critic Brian Sholis (also available on Brian Sholis’s personal blog, which I’ve long enjoyed). It begins this way:

The idea for the book came about fifteen years ago. Walks are
contemplative times and spaces, and going over the same territory day
after day gave me the opportunity to see things over the relatively longue durée:
construction projects, seasonal activities, changes in commercial life,
in culture, in the population. After dilating internally on the happy
accidents produced by the city and on the quality of my immediate
environment, I thought I’d begin to write about it. Not only did I want
to do something a little bit popular, but also to bring together
discourses that are normally segregated: formal, economic,
sociological, political, quotidian. I wanted to show, for example, how
the ratio of a stair riser has ramifications up to the organization of
property and beyond. Twenty Minutes turned out to be
frequently delayed; I probably completed half a dozen other books while
writing this one. I was also gentrified out of my old studio midway,
which changed my route. But the walks were comparable and in the same
neighborhood. The only historical event that doesn’t fully register in
the pages of the book is 9/11, in part because I have dealt with it at
length elsewhere.

“Elsewhere” would be here.

As a more personal postscript, I have to say: Brian Sholis has taste. In a post earlier this year he noted some high quality reading on his nightstand.