“Modern architecture triumphed not because a few emigres managed to dupe a class of clients gone totally supine or because of the abiding credulity of Americans hopelessly drawn to any idea presented with an accent. And, indeed, he has, albeit a slim one,” starts a Sorkin column obliterating Wolfe’s 1981 best-selling polemic From Bauhaus to Our House. “What Tom Wolfe doesn’t know about modern architecture could fill a book. If I remember correctly, it came with a gentle warning along the lines of “Michael Sorkin is brilliant, but don’t try to imitate him.” But one day, the editor-in-chief, Susan Szenasy, handed me a copy of Exquisite Corpse, a hefty, well-made hardcover from Verso. There is a reason books about architecture are not more popular most of them are dull, pedantic, just plain bad. Usually, this homework knocked me out cold. So every night before I went home, I grabbed a couple of books from the office library and stayed up late reading. I had aspirations to write for magazines, but the only one that offered me a job covered architecture and design, subjects I knew practically nothing about. The year was 1991 the aftereffects of the ’87 crash still hung over New York City, and the media biz was in the dumps. That was three decades ago, when I worked at a magazine called Metropolis, my first job out of college, and Exquisite Corpse saved my neck. I recently reread Exquisite Corpse to remember Michael, who died of COVID a year ago this month, and it lit up my mind as much as it did when it came out. They are, I am here to tell you, truly great - a crackling, combative serial of how New York City crawled out of the ’70s only to emerge into the bright lights of the ’80s mightily mixed up about who and what it stood for. The author, Michael Sorkin, was the architecture critic for the Village Voice in the 1980s, and the book collects his greatest hits from that tenure. Urn:oclc:40144598 Republisher_date 20120829200051 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120825070316 Scanner you’re ever lucky enough to spot a copy of Exquisite Corpse in a used-book bin or gathering dust on somebody’s shelf, snatch it.

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Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 17:17:18 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA155101 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donorįriendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary Edition 1st Scribner pbk.

Exquisite corpse book