Magazine

Michael Sorkin lives just three blocks from the Blue Note in New York’s Greenwich Village, and it shows: His architecture criticism in Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is perhaps best understood as a series of jazz solos. In each chapter Sorkin takes a structure or a place and riffs on it, taking the theme to unanticipated places, his lifetime of experience as architecture professor, practitioner, critic and world traveler all informing his work.

The conceit of Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is that Sorkin is taking the reader along on his daily walk from his apartment off Washington Square Park to his architecture studio in Tribeca. For a man whose mirthfully Manichaean worldview divides architects into “poets and bandits,” Sorkin is both. The reader is happily hoodwinked into a general discussion of the use and abuse of cities out of the specifics of Sorkin’s pedestrian commute. The discussion of LaGuardia Place and the superblocks behind it leaps into a discussion of modernist planning; a walk through Soho yields to more general musings on gentrification; the chapter on something as simple as stairs ends up with Sorkin mulling over the varieties of city life at different grades — from the skyways of Houston to the underground passageways of Montreal, to the cliff-dwelling Anasazi settlements of the American West, where the streets sit atop the roofs and buildings are entered through ladders in the ceiling. A student of history and a globetrotter, Sorkin’s manic mind contains multitudes: A discussion of the Manhattan street grid begins in Ancient Greece; the contemporary shopping mall, he insists, must be understood in the context of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.