Columbia GSAPP presents PEOPLE CROSS AGAINST THE LIGHT: Michael Sorkin’s New York, on view from February 26 through June 26, 2026 at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery in Buell Hall.

The exhibition focuses on eight speculative architectural projects that Michael Sorkin and collaborators designed for New York City between 1987 and 1996—a period during which Sorkin gradually transitioned from being one of the most incisive and widely read public intellectuals interrogating New York’s built environment in his role as architecture critic for The Village Voice to establishing his own design studio.

Sorkin’s work as a writer and as a designer should be understood as inseparable. Across both modes of practice, and through a variety of media, architecture and urbanism emerge as continuously negotiated assemblies of social, economic, political, and aesthetic forces and conflicts. Sorkin’s projects reveal the built environment as a complex ecology in which prevailing structures of power are challenged through strategic acts of obstruction—slowing dominant forces just enough for fissures to appear, opening space for critical intervention.

PEOPLE CROSS AGAINST THE LIGHT draws extensively on loans from Avery Archives, and is curated by Bart-Jan Polman, GSAPP’s Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, together with Jean Im, Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs. The exhibition extends into a symposium discussing Sorkin’s work, currently scheduled for February 27, 2026.