The American architect and critic Michael Sorkin has died at the age of 71, from complications brought on by Covid-19. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1948, Sorkin was architecture critic at The Village Voice throughout the 1980s, contributing to numerous other publications including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Wall Street Journal. He earned a reputation for polemical contributions to debates on democracy in urban planning, sustainability and environmentalism in architecture, and the legacies of modernism; several collections of his criticism have since been published internationally. The Michael Sorkin Studio was founded in the 1980s in New York, with its first commission the redevelopment of Atlanta city centre, which was completed in 1986. Recent projects include several large-scale urban redevelopments in China. In 2005, Sorkin founded the not-for-profit Terreform institute for urban research.
Once a place where sea, desert, and palm groves coexisted in rare harmony, Tunisia’s Gabès Oasis stands today as one of the world’s most fragile cultural-environmental sites. At its heart is artist Mohamed Amine Hamouda, whose ecological practice offers a form of resistance—one built on memory, materials, and a return to ancestral knowledge.