Michael Sorkin is Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at The City College of New York (CCNY), where he has taught since 2000. He is also Founder of Terreform Inc., a non-profit organization devoted to urban and environmental research and intervention in issues of urban morphology, sustainability, equity, and community planning.
Michael Sorkin Studio is a design practice devoted to both practical and theoretical projects at all scales, with special interest in sustainable urban environments and green architecture. Recent projects include master-planning in Hamburg, Visselhövede, Leipzig and Schwerin, Germany; planning for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem; planning and design for a highly sustainable 5000-unit community in Penang, Malaysia; and studies of the Manhattan waterfront and Arverne, Queens, New York.
He studied architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He also holds degrees from the University of Chicago (BA) and Columbia (MA).
From 1993 until 2000, he was Professor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He has also been professor at numerous architecture schools including Cooper Union, Colombia, Yale and Harvard.
Michael Sorkin lectures widely, and is author of many texts for general and professional audiences. He is currently contributing editor at Architectural Record and Metropolis and was architecture critic of The Village Voice for ten years. He is author of over a dozen books including Variations on a Theme Park, Exquisite Corpse, Wiggle, The Next Jerusalem, Back to Zero, Some Assembly Required, and After the Trade Center (edited with Sharon Zukin).
The studio is the recipient of a variety of awards including three ID Awards and a Progressive Architecture Award. In 2005/06, Sorkin directed studio projects for the post-Katrina reconstruction of Biloxi and New Orleans, and is currently at work on a plan for a self-sufficient, post-petroleum city in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
He will be head of the global jury for the World Architecture Festival Awards 2011.
Michael Sorkin was a member of the Concluding Panel Discussion at the 2nd International Holcim Forum 2007 in Shanghai and presented the case study Feeding New York in New York in the workshop Mine the city - With logistics to circular metabolisms at the 3rd International Holcim Forum 2010 in Mexico City.
[last updated 06-Jul-11]