The coronavirus pandemic has already caused unfathomable damage to city life in ways big and small. One very specific and sad way in which the virus has darkened the urban prospect is by causing the death last week of the architect and writer Michael Sorkin.

Based in and synonymous with New York City, Sorkin was the kind of politically engaged, incisive, and humane polymath that other famous architects sometimes try unconvincingly to impersonate. At seventy-one, Sorkin had accomplished multiple careers’ worth of achievements: principal of Michael Sorkin Studio; founder and president of the nonprofit research organization Terreform; creator of the publishing imprint Urban Research; distinguished professor of urban design in the architecture school at City College of New York; writer for publications like the Village Voice, the Nation, and Architectural Record.

More generally, Michael Sorkin was an iconic example of a genuinely left-wing architect and urban public intellectual. He should be seen as part of a tradition that includes figures like Lewis Mumford and Marshall Berman: humanist, cosmopolitan New Yorkers who brought a socialist sensibility to urbanism.