A

AIA CES Credits

AV Office

Abstract Publication

Academic Affairs

Academic Calendar, Columbia University

Academic Calendar, GSAPP

Admissions Office

Advanced Standing Waiver Form

Alumni Board

Alumni Office

Architecture Studio Lottery

Assistantships

Avery Library

Avery Review

Avery Shorts

S

STEM Designation

Satisfactory Academic Progress

Scholarships

Skill Trails

Student Affairs

Student Awards

Student Conduct

Student Council (All Programs)

Student Financial Services

Student Health Services at Columbia

Student Organization Handbook

Student Organizations

Student Services Center

Student Services Online (SSOL)

Student Work Online

Studio Culture Policy

Studio Procedures

Summer Workshops

Support GSAPP

Close
This website uses cookies as well as similar tools and technologies to understand visitors' experiences. By continuing to use this website, you consent to Columbia University's usage of cookies and similar technologies, in accordance with the Columbia University Website Cookie Notice Group 6

People Cross Against the Light: Michael Sorkin’s New York.

Thu, Feb 26    6pm

Columbia GSAPP presents PEOPLE CROSS AGAINST THE LIGHT: Michael Sorkin’s New York, on view from February 19 through June 26, 2026 at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery in Buell Hall.

The exhibition focuses on eight speculative architectural projects that Michael Sorkin and collaborators designed for New York City between 1987 and 1996—a period during which Sorkin gradually transitioned from being one of the most incisive and widely read public intellectuals interrogating New York’s built environment in his role as architecture critic for The Village Voice to establishing his own design studio.

Sorkin’s work as a writer and as a designer should be understood as inseparable. Across both modes of practice, and through a variety of media, architecture and urbanism emerge as continuously negotiated assemblies of social, economic, political, and aesthetic forces and conflicts. Sorkin’s projects reveal the built environment as a complex ecology in which prevailing structures of power are challenged through strategic acts of obstruction—slowing dominant forces just enough for fissures to appear, opening space for critical intervention.

PEOPLE CROSS AGAINST THE LIGHT draws extensively on loans from Avery Archives as well as private collections, and is curated by Bart-Jan Polman, GSAPP’s Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, together with Jean Im, Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs.

The exhibition extends into a symposium discussing Sorkin’s work, which is scheduled for February 27, 2026, from 2-6 PM in the Maison Française, Buell Hall.