On Thursday, March 26th, Michael Sorkin passed away in New York City from complications of the Coronavirus pandemic. We learned the news shortly after we checked in on Ernst Wagner, our Founder. Michael and Ernst knew each other for several decades, and Michael was a supporter of the foundation from its beginning.
He was an award-winning architect, Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York, as well as President of the non-profit architecture and urban think tank Terreform.
In 2010, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in architecture and, in 2013, the National Design Award in the Design Mind category. For ten years, Michael was architecture critic for the Village Voice; and later the critic at the Nation and wrote regularly for Architectural Record and the Architectural Review. He wrote several books including Exquisite Corpse, Some Assembly Required, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Wiggle, and All Over the Map.
When we were preparing our exhibition to celebrate Paul Rudolph’s centennial, Ernst remembered Michael had written a poem in honor of Rudolph back in 1993. We reached out to him and after going through his archives, he sent us a copy along with permission to publish it. It is a brilliant work and speaks as much about Mr. Sorkin as it does about Mr. Rudolph. We last saw Michael at a Michael Webb book event held at the Modulightor building, and later at the opening of our exhibition, “Paul Rudolph: the Personal Laboratory.”
His voice, insight and support will be profoundly missed. Our thoughts are with his friends and family.
In remembrance of Mr. Sorkin we publish his poem below.
FOR PAUL RUDOLPH
MICHAEL SORKIN, 1993
On the occasion of his being honored by the
Harvard Graduate School of Design Alumni Association
Flipping through that big green book,
awash in ink
stipple and line
hatch and tone
section and plan
perspective points, vanishing into rigorous distances,
can anyone not wonder at what’s to come, successor volumes there have to be?
1972 is the date (Paul just 54) and in this old man’s business the volume already holds twice the work sufficient to certify genius in this fickle or some more devoted age.
But also holds the retrospective anticipation of a void.
We all know the story, don’t we.
Of a compost of laurels
hailing a forbidden career
ultimately signifying our own infertility
and self-indicating disrespect.
I celebrate Rudolph for the courage of art: joy in the face of all these refined ceremonies of indifference with which he’s too well rewarded, for carrying on, for making it newly.
That hot green book says it all, eye-etching, tenacious, phosphorescent long after it’s slip-cased and returned to the shelf.
What can we add of it, or of him, beyond the fat oratory of encomium?
For starters, we can say that here’s a man who draws.
Is there another way for an architect to be great?
Not.
Architecture must be material before the fact, less and more than ether, passionately distorted by its own secrets.
That book is the scan of the burnishing imager.
Those timely, timeless, inevitable lines gestate the third dimension and the fourth, converging, like destiny, on a single point.
In this aping mediated time, fashion casts the architect mere amanuensis to culture, jumping to galvanic impulses from the ungraspable.
Art directors and bureaucrats rule, satisfied merely to mirror their taste, and their chatter sucks the necessary air from the small chamber of art.
Paul Rudolph is not this.
He simply shows us the work and the way, the splendid autonomies of hand, true companion-medium of architectural thought.
Demurring the gloss, overwhelming with substance, with transparency and thickness, texture and chill smoothness, light bright and gloomy, rippling modulations of space,
Proteus proves he’s no puppet.
Where did this come from?
What haphazard biography, what genome irrigated this flow of concertized joy?
What consort of chromosomes conspired to grow that brush cut carrot lawn I’d swap my thinning curls for in half a flash?
Let’s try some dismissal science,
brief facts to assay this opaque miracle.
A peripatetic preacher’s boy growing up around the south might be bred for this courtliness and rectitude, not to mention the ebbless wanderlust that makes a phone call iffy.
I’m sorry, he’s in Jakarta.
I’m sorry, he’s in Hong Kong.
I’m sorry, he’s in Tokyo, in between, back soon, off to Texas.
I’m certain Singapore, Java, and Texas have no regrets about this moving love of place.
What sights espied in his ingenious youth lead to all of this?
No courthouse steps nor capital domes nor dog trot shacks could add up by any familiar math to this flow of monuments.
Perhaps it was just something in the air, in those sticky, torpid, buzzing, evenings, those moss-dripping oaks limning their twilight caverns,
Perhaps it was something in the pens or pencils of Alabama.
Maybe the twist came… at Harvard.
Some osmosis surely worked on him, that brave new atmosphere, frail happy export of miserable Europe.
What times those must have been, things diminished by events but surely in rare relief, posing their pale certainties against the monster times.
The righteous parsimony of the Gropian dream sat fine with the parson’s son, and he learned these lessons very well.
Can we say, though, this was more important than the chirping of southern birds,
or the years in Brooklyn,
directing operatic forces to ship making steel, our architecture’s own best unattained vision of itself, invented all around by people who simply saw the matter differently?
Who knows?
So let’s just get down to cases.
We begin in Florida, a wise choice whatever the why.
The tropics so become the modern, the torpor, the indolence, the playing sun, the swaying palms,
the undulant swamp blades in breeze, flat dappled ocean vanishing to horizon.
Here architecture fast abuts its superfluities, here Paul first flourished.
Those happy houses were the chrysalis of genius.
Slung roofed Healy, lowered and light, hanging out over quiet water,
Bent ply roofs inverting the droop,
delicate rhythms, skimming the land like waves’ gentle lap,
full of sun and wind and view,
ineffably light,
prosody all there,
opening and shutting with cannonball counter-weighted flaps,
an invitation to live simply and to live well.
This magic sparsity
this confident equipoise, this delirious matriation of form and place!
Look at the photographs, feel breezes.
Look at the drawings, feel stasis and motion, the repose of spirit as the space flows through this fearless symmetry!
Rippling Sarasota High.
Milam, Mondrian made space,
Jacksonville boogie-woogie, one perfect palm leaning in to syncopate the view.
Look out those windows,
see the future.
Moving north,
Wellesley college now, where
daughters of privilege stride in cashmere and plaid through another fantasyland, palmless but sylvan, pastiche of happy collegiality.
Like a philosopher’s stone, this masonry glade evokes another truth, obscured by the rich simplicity of what had been before.
And what was simply this:
that here was a builder whose skin moved with the kinesthesia of place.
Paul’s simplicities were not creed-made but response,
making work of site and not merely on it.
Like his predecessor, co-practitioner, muse, the greatest of them all, the genius Wright,
came another genius of the genius loci and the misspent word scarcely describes how fine.
This first great work of the north showed Paul not just master of within/without but foreman of the thick,
of accelerant densities, of weight, of stately mass, of the orders of complication and assembly that make life in public both beautiful and benign.
We’re moving faster now, the career’s accelerating, but another note doesn’t interrupt the cadence, just augments the harmony.
I mean no offense of this august assembly if I introduce a four-letter word which in ’57 declared a red letter day.
Of course, that word in Yale and there seven years long our man served Minerva and built her palace in bush hammered beton.
Joining speech and act, he educated a generation and his students now serve at power, serving out their own expiring terms at the center.
Curious group.
Perhaps too generously taught by Paul, who, friendly ever to the plurality of ways
which serve to serve the beautiful,
produced at Yale a crew whose sometime brilliance shines along with others more motley if no less present on the glossy pages of the ephemeral history of a recent and soon bygone present,
marking no failure but generosity and that curiosity that led and leads him throughout the world with a cocked recording eye and a taste still rounding out the shape of its own inevitability.
A related anecdote.
A long drive to New Haven in a car too small, sitting in the backwash of a smoker who wouldn’t be curbed, amiable and eager for the new, yet discreet, prudently evading the repeated temptations of gossip gone a tad too far.
Riding to studio in an elevator surrounded by his achievement, recognized only by some, an unfamiliar figure in the myopic tiltings of that little hothouse, he takes his seat in front of work at some far latitudes of investigation.
His interest, though, is clear, his curiosity deep however short his patience with frivolousness or the surfeit of explanation that so belabors so much of what we nowadays do. His gaze is piercing, acute as he searchingly vets the work looking for something.
Are you curious?
Does he test for confirmation of some beloved theory, excavate for signs that some fledgling talent executes her dream in shades of the familiar, retroactive corroboration of some foible or figuration of his own?
Not at all.
He tests for the nuance of the drawn.
He searches for anticipations of the palpability of space.
He scans the walls for some component of this craziness that might truly be architecture.
And, more than once (I insist on this more, they were my students, after all),
and, more than once, he finds it, lights up with collegial veneration, with crisp and generous praise. Suffering frustrated experiments in kindly skeptic silence, he lights up for what he loves.
Back to cases.
Chronology grows useless as press bears yearly, monthly out the hugeness of the man’s mind and hand.
Tuskegee cranks into the nautiline spiral of the baroque, all top-lit and thick and harbinger.
Indeed, if anything could come of this elyomosonary afternoon it would not simply be the plumped coffers of our dear old school but a march to those authorities who late contemplate construction of that missing completing tower, the urging on of those empowered few to do the right thing for their city, for us, for architecture.
Paul Rudolph has never done less.
At Goshen with its isometric phantasmagoria
At the garage, plastic and long, lifting the frail visuality of that tacky site to visionary weight
At the A and A, pin-wheeled and interpenetrating, geologic on its corner, turning point.
At Endo, at Colgate, at Southeastern Mass,
shadowed and plastic
more moves each than most make in a career.
At Crawford, slim tower, rival to Bartlesville.
At Burroughs, this side of Sci-Fi, sleek sawtoothed section.
At unbuilt Graphic Arts, glorious sad signifier of short sight, a view my own studio window might have had if only our urbanity knew something real of ecstasy.
At Djakarta, concrete pagoda, sleek and inevitable as a tree.
At Hong Kong and Fort Worth, bristling pairs of pairs.
At Singapore, mix and forms surpassing rich and fine.
And at what unenumerated sites
will this great architect, hero to me,
ever at the high noon of his mid-career
show us what we had never hoped to see.