Michael & Marshall: Celebrating Friendship, Life & Scholarship

City College President Vincent Boudreau and Spitzer School Dean Marta Gutman invite you to join them on Thursday, December 1 at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York to celebrate the friendship, lives and scholarship of Michael Sorkin and Marshall Berman.

The Sorkin Reading Room, dedicated to its namesake, Michael Sorkin, the late distinguished professor of architecture, will open on December 1. An author, activist, architecture critic, urbanist, and the head of Michael Sorkin Studios and Terreform, Sorkin joined the Spitzer School as a professor of architecture and director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design in 2000. He founded the Mumford Lectures which boasts stellar speakers. In 2008, he was made a distinguished professor. Sorkin died of coronavirus in March 2020.

The Spitzer School of Architecture will also announce an extraordinary gift: the collection of books and archives belonging to Professor Marshall Berman (1940-2013). The collection will be housed in the CCNY Architecture Library. Berman, a distinguished professor of political science in CCNY’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership and the Graduate Center, CUNY, taught political theory and urban studies. This gift allows researchers to have access to documents to engage with and continue Berman’s work.

The 51st anniversaries of the Graduate Programs in Urban Design and Landscape Architecture will also be celebrated on December 1st and a campaign launched to fund the Michael Sorkin Distinguished Visiting Lecturer, a new faculty position at the Spitzer School.

In keeping with Michael’s and Marshall’s proclivities festive attire is suggested.

About The Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture:

The Spitzer School of Architecture at City College, now more than fifty years old, is the flagship public school of architecture in New York City. Its emphasis on the urban environment as the most important generator of ideas about the appropriateness of programs and forms makes it unique among the constellation of architecture schools in New York and the surrounding region. Nearly 500 students from the city, the country, and around the world pursue professional undergraduate degrees in architecture and graduate degrees in architecture, urban landscape architecture, urban design, and sustainability in the urban environment. They are taught by faculty who are also deeply engaged in New York City as licensed architects and landscape architects, critics, and scholars.