Michael Sorkin Studio, Terreform, and Urban Research 

In 2005, Michael Sorkin Studio underwent a mitosis with the founding of Terreform. 

Given a long history of polemical and activist work in a variety of registers, including design, advocacy, and writing - there’d been a long simmering desire to find a form of practice that was more transparent with the non-commercial – even utopian – projects and ambitions that engaged us.  Not wanting to give up the prospect of “ordinary” building, however, we formalized the conceptual split into a “straight” architectural practice and an organization doing research, unsolicited interventions, publishing, and propositions. 

The studio works in a single spirit with a focus on questions of city, on its morphology, systems of equity, and metabolic behavior.  Each side serves as the lab for the other but we’re all on the same page: the iron fiscal curtain between the two entities is a membrane that’s completely porous to ideas. 

In 2016, Terreform launched its publishing imprint Urban Research (UR). UR is intended both as a medium for disseminating our work and as a support structure for designers and researchers who share the project of a progressive and liberated urbanism.