Suchergebnisse

"The rise and fall of New York--a radical architect's view of the destruction of the city Michael Sorkin is one of the most forthright and engaging architectural writers in the world. In What Goes Up he charts the dehumanising regimes of mayors Bloomberg and De Blasio that created a city of glittering towers and increasing inequality. He looks at what has happened to Ground Zero, as a place of memory has been reconstructed by "staritects" and turned into malls. The city, he suggests, has to be reimagined from the street up on a human scale, to develop new ways to revitalise neighbourhoods Alongside these essays on New York, Sorkin also brings his lifetime's experience as an architect to bear. He talks of the joy of observing a city in order to understand it. Why a young designer must learn to draw by hand rather than only use a computer. There are also personal encounters with some of the greatest names who have changed the city. Sorkin gets lost in Rio with Zaha Hadid; talks about the old Bronx with Marshall Berman; and gets on the wrong side of Daniel Libeskind"--

Showing how the upswell of paranoia and growing demand for security in the post-9/11 world has paradoxically created widespread insecurity, these varied essays examine how this anxiety-laden mindset erodes spaces both architectural and personal, encroaching on all aspects of everyday life. Starting from the most literal level-barricades and barriers in front of buildings, beefed up border patrols, gated communities, "safe rooms,"-to more abstract levels-enhanced surveillance at public spaces such as airports, increasing worries about contagion, the psychological predilection for fortified spac

The monster's tail / Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir -- Primitive separations / Dean MacCannell -- Why this wall? / Stephanie Koury -- Wall notes / Tom Kay -- Keeping a one-week diary, or, pastrami sandwich with concrete wrapping / Suad Amiry -- The great wall of capital / Mike Davis -- The long economic shadow of the wall / Anita Vitullo -- Border/skin / Lindsay Bremmer -- Barriers, walls, and dialectics : the shaping of 'creeping apartheid' in Israel/Palestine / Oren Yiftachel and Haim Yacobi -- Spacio-cide and bio-politics : the Israeli colonial conflict from 1947 to the wall / Sari Hanafi -- How to really tear down the wall between blue and red / Slavoj Zizek -- Twenty-three steps across the border and back / Rebecca Solnit -- Border spaces/ghettospheres / Daniel Bertrand Monk -- Transparent wall, opaque gates / Ruchama Marton and Dalit Baum -- Hollow land : the barrier archipelago and the impossible politics of separation / Eyal Weizman -- In the spirit of activism / Terry Boullata -- The wall game / Lebbeus Woods

Sardonic, cutting, insightful, provocative: Michael Sorkin is one of today's most radical architectural commentators with a staunch leaning to the political left and a literary bent for framing painful truths in ironic, and sometimes hilarious, verse. However, he should not be dismissed as a radical, isolated, or lone and unhindered voice however. He is a Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York, and he has been Professor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In addition, he has taught at architecture schools across the world, including the Architectural Association, Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Cornell. Sorkin runs his own design studio and research institute and has been a contributing editor of the Architectural Record. He was the architecture critic of the Village Voice for ten years and has published innumerable articles and essays. A list of some of his books includes: Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Variations on a Theme Park, Exquisite Corpse, The Next Jerusalem, Indefensible Space, and a long list of other etcs. and alsos . In this interview-article, he offers his opinion on a range of issues, including the environmental threats to contemporary America, architectural symbolism and paranoia, the importance of political action on the streets of the modern city, and the role of the architecture critic in the complex tapestry of contemporary culture. With regard the position of the modern critic, he begins by responding to a question regarding the relevance of Noam Chomsky's description of the media as a form of propaganda and the contemporary journalist as functioning through the structure of what Chomsky defines as "filters," or constraints and biases that dictate what gets written and published in the press.

"The Gaza Strip is one of the most beleaguered envrionments on earth. Crammed into a space of 139 square miles (360 square kilometers), 1.8 million people live under an Israeli siege, enforcing conditions that continue to plummet to ever more unimaginable depths of degradation and despair. Gaza, however, is more than an endless encyclopedia of depressing statistics. It is also a place of fortitude, resistance, and imagination; a context in which inhabitants go to remarkable lengths to create the ordinary conditions of the everyday and to reject their exceptional status. Inspired by Gaza's inhabitants, this book builds on the positive capabilities of Gazans. It brings together environmentalists, planners, activists, and scholars from Palestine and Israel, the US, the UK, India, and elsewhere to create hopeful interventions that imagine a better place for Gazans and Palestinians. Open Gaza engages the Gaza Strip within and beyond the logics of siege and warfare, it considers how life can be improved inside the limitations imposed by the Israeli blockade, and outside the idiocy of violence and warfare"--