Exquisite Corpse: Writings on Buildings - Hardcover

Sorkin, Michael

3.83

30 ratings by Goodreads

9780860913238: Exquisite Corpse: Writings on Buildings

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0860913236 ISBN 13: 9780860913238

Publisher: Verso, 1991

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‘Exquisite Corpse’ was a game played by the surrealists in which someone drew on a piece of paper, folded it and passed it to the next person to draw on until, finally, the sheet was opened to reveal a calculated yet random composition. In this entertaining and provocative book, Michael Sorkin suggests that cities are similarly assembled by many players acting with varying autonomy in a complicit framework. An unfolding terrain of invention, the city is also a means of accommodating disparity, of contextualizing sometimes startling juxtapositions.

Sorkin’s aim is to widen the debate about the creation of buildings beyond the immediate issues of technology and design. He discusses the politics and culture of architecture with daring, often devastating, observations about the institutions and personalities who have dominated the profession over the past decade. Their preoccupation with the empty style of ‘beach houses and Disneyland’ has consistently trivialized the full constructive scope of contemporary architecture’s possibilities.

Sorkin’s interventions range from the development scandals of New York where ‘skyscrapers stand at the intersection between grid and greed’, through the deconstructivist architectural culture of Los Angeles, to the work and ideas of architects, developers and critics such as Alvar Aalto, Norman Foster, Paul Goldberger, Michael Graves, Coop Himmelblau, Philip Johnson, Leon Krier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Rogers, Carlo Scarpa, James Stirling, Donald Trump, Tom Wolfe and Lebbeus Woods. Throughout Sorkin combines stinging polemic with a powerful call for a rebirth of architecture that is visionary and experimental—a recuperated ‘dreamy science’

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About the Author:

Michael Sorkin is an award-winning architect and Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York. His books include The Next Jerusalem, After the World Trade Center, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan and All Over the Map.

From Publishers Weekly:

Sorkin, a practicing architect and Yale professor who for 10 years was the Village Voice 's architecture critic, is a formidable opponent of the banal, the ugly, the stupid and the vapidly posturing which, he argues, are all around us. In these 56 fearless, salubrious essays, reviews, diatribes and encomiums from the Voice , the Nation , Architectural Rec ord and elsewhere, he finds much contemporary architecture preoccupied with empty style and only dimly awakening from its "Reaganoid snooze." Philip Johnson is dismissed as a trendy tastemaker and condemned for his alleged pro-Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitism during the 1930s. He calls Donald Trump "arrogant apostle of the indefensible" and lambastes New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger as "embodiment of the aesthetics of yuppification." Sorkin's tastes run to Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright, urban visionary Lebbeus Woods and the Italian Carlo Scarpa. Sidetrips to Los Angeles and Las Vegas round out a punchy, provocative collection. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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