PEOPLE CROSS AGAINST THE LIGHT: Michael Sorkin’s New York

Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) is pleased to present PEOPLE CROSS AGAINST THE LIGHT: Michael Sorkin’s New York. The exhibition brings together eight architectural projects Michael Sorkin (1948–2020) conceived for New York City, the primary site of his architectural and urban speculation, over a pivotal decade of his career. On view from February 26 through June 26, 2026, at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery in Buell Hall, the projects were designed between 1987 and 1996—a period that marks Sorkin’s transition from being New York’s most incisive and widely read architecture critic, through his writing for The Village Voice, to his accelerated investment in design work with his own practice, Michael Sorkin Studio.

Rather than separating his work as a critic and as a designer, the exhibition approaches them as deeply entangled. Sorkin consistently challenged authority, destabilized established power structures, and understood politics as a complex ecology shaped by multiple forces. The projects on view present the built environment as a layered field in which prevailing systems—of infrastructure, regulation, capital, and representation—can be contested through strategic acts of obstruction. In Sorkin’s work, obstruction is not a refusal but a generative tool: a means of slowing dominant forces long enough for alternative forms of collective life to emerge.

The exhibition presents more than one hundred items, including several never-before-seen large-scale models, drawings, sketches, writings, and archival material by Michael Sorkin, his studio, and collaborators such as Lebbeus Woods and John Young. Among the projects on view are two unsolicited proposals developed for the Television City site between 59th and 72nd Streets, then being developed by Donald Trump.

The exhibition’s title, People Cross Against the Light, is drawn from Sorkin’s 2010 essay “Nine Fabulous Things About New York.” It reflects his close relationship to the city and his attention to small, everyday acts that unsettle authority. The phrase also gestures toward the humanism that increasingly characterized Sorkin’s later work, where political imagination was grounded in lived urban experience.

Throughout a career spanning teaching, research, design, activism, acting and writing, Michael Sorkin understood stability as the by-product of diversity. This conviction helps explain both his enduring love for New York and the character of his practice. Wary of singular representations, he consistently blurred disciplinary boundaries and resisted working within a single medium or style. The eight projects in the exhibition articulate an architecture shaped by friction: between ecology and real-estate speculation, collective life and regulatory control, and digital abstraction and lived urban conditions. Projects such as Mass Movement (1987) and Time Square / The Eleventh Hour (1987) explore entertainment culture, real-estate speculation, and early digital representation in Reagan-era New York. Later works—including Animal Houses (1989-1993), Tracked Houses (1990), Church Street (1991), Shrooms (1994), the Governor’s Island proposal (1995–96), and East New York (1995-1996)—develop increasingly explicit engagements with biomorphism, infrastructure, self-reliance, and ecological urbanism. Together, these projects reveal critique not as an endpoint, but as the starting point for design.