People Cross Against the Light

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.