Michael Sorkin

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Kill the Expressway!

July 20, 2010 in Architecture by Bryan

Last week I caught a segment on American Public Media/NPR’s Marketplace, reported by Andrea Bernstein. The topic was the movement across the country to take down old expressways in dense urban centers, let traffic disperse and congestion take care of itself, and build pedestrian-friendly parks and promenades in their places instead. Such a plan would certainly have Robert Moses rolling over in his grave, which means it’s probably a half-decent proposal.

Bernstein interviewed Michael Sorkin, Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York, who has drawn up plans (pictured above) for what the area around Brooklyn Bridge would look like without that pesky freeway clogging everything up and rendering most of the space around the bridge a series of eyesores. For additional slides, including some takes on a similar project in Milwaukee, click here.

A clip from the transcript of the interview:

Andrea Bernstein: Near the lower tip of Manhattan, Michael Sorkin is standing just yards from the East River and Brooklyn Bridge, but you can barely see them. So he looks up.

Michael Sorkin: We see traffic that is in at least three different levels. There’s the FDR Drive. There’s an interchange to get people onto the Brooklyn Bridge that’s flying over the FDR Drive, and then flying over that is the Brooklyn Bridge.

Sorkin is an architect and head of urban design at City College of New York. He’s drawn up a different blueprint for this patch of Manhattan. Tear down a section of the elevated highway, the on-ramps and cloverleafs.

Sorkin: You would see one of the most beautiful architectural achievements in the history of consciousness, the Brooklyn Bridge.

The rest of the interview, audio and transcript, here.

What do you think? Though the rendering is a little cheesy, I’m not opposed to opening up views of the Bridge. And I was once stuck on the lower portion of the FDR, between the Brooklyn Bridge exit and the Battery, for almost two hours, with my apartment in sight the whole while. What a miserable nightmare that was. I’d almost wish the FDR gone over that incident alone.

Previously on PWHNY.

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Walk This Way

July 23, 2009 in Architecture, Books by Bryan

sorkin.jpg

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.

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