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SYSTEMIC DESIGN | GRAMSCI, SORKIN, ABDULLA
Can designers think?
(Dana Abdulla’s designerly list in memory of Michael Sorkin)
In March 2020, right in the middle of the first horrible onslaught of Covid-19, when so many people who caught the disease ended up in dehumanized isolation wards and went through their final hours gasping for air with nobody to support them, Michael Sorkin was one of those to miserably pass into the unknown, in a Manhattan hospital.
To say that Sorkin was an icon, a legend even in his lifetime, would be an understatement. He had been an architect and an urbanist first and foremost, but it was as a designer, educator, public speaker, and author, that he had risen to stardom. He was the co-president of the Institute for Urban Design, an education and advocacy organization, and vice president of the Urban Design Forum in New York.
To most of us in the design community, Sorkin was the Green Urbanist and one of the key figureheads of the emerging field of systemic design. He should not have died then and there and thus. He was only 71.
Sorkin was a prolific writer, never shying away from spewing his often acidic critiques into the community, but always spiced with a bright and witty sense of humor. A case in point is his Two Hundred and…
