99PI: The Smell of Concrete After Rain

Boston City Hall. Photo by Ezra Stoller/ESTO.

We’ve lost quite a few people in the design world since the beginning of the pandemic due to COVID-19. One of them was Michael McKinnell, co-designer of Boston’s Brutalist City Hall, and another voice who is gone too early was Michael Sorkin. Sorkin was an architect and the Village Voice architecture critic in the 80s. He brought a totally new kind of approach to writing about buildings, one that focused on people and politics.

We spoke with design critic at Curbed, Alexandra Lange, about Sorkin’s work, and Roman Mars reads excerpts from one of his works called “Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know.”