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Was Michael Sorkin “the last real critic”?
A conversation with Bart-Jan Polman, curator of a new exhibition at Columbia on Sorkin’s work as writer, architect, and urban designer; plus, best and worst takes on LACMA, the New Museum, and the Trump library
Christopher Hawthorne
April 10, 2026
A model of Sorkin Studio’s “Tracked Houses,” 1990. Sorkin described these as “polemical houses” that were “inspired by the plight of a community of homeless people living in a railway tunnel and abandoned rail yard on the west side of Manhattan” and “intended to evoke the constrained nomadism of this rejected population.” Model courtesy Joan Copjec. Photograph courtesy of Drawings and Archives, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
This week we present something of an experiment: A review in the form of a Q&A, or maybe vice versa. The subject is “People Cross Against the Light: Michael Sorkin’s New York,” an exhibition on the late critic and architect running through June 26 at Columbia University’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery.
I visited the show last month, and over the last several days I’ve been trading emails with Bart-Jan Polman, who organized it as the Curator of the Ross Gallery and Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, or GSAPP. The exhibition draws directly from Sorkin’s archive, which his widow, the philosopher and Brown professor (and former October editor) Joan Copjec, donated to Columbia’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library in 2024.
In part the Q&A format appealed to me as a way of exploring this show—which focuses largely on Sorkin’s relationship with New York City, where he spent the entirety of his career—because Sorkin himself was impatient with traditional modes, registers, and platforms for architecture criticism. I wondered what Bart and I might discover or at least communicate about the exhibition through a back-and-forth. I’m grateful to him for taking part.
Read on for Bart’s thoughts about why Sorkin is sometimes remembered as “the last real critic”; his relevance to the current moment in architecture and criticism; and what he might have made of the fact, as an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, that this exhibition of his work is taking place on a Columbia campus still on lockdown following protests over the war in Gaza.
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