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.
I visited Laila Muraywid’s studio in Paris, it is the kind of place that rearranges your inner geography. A Syrian artist working between painting and sculpture, she creates objects that feel at once intimate yet cosmic, like relics from ancient times that pulse with contemporary pain and splendour.