Mr. Dolan, tear down this arena. (MAS/Twitter)

The MAS Summit has been going on for the past two days, and it has been a cornucopia of delights for the city-obsessed, full of zany proposals for affordable housing, green buildings, starchitecture, community-based development and a giant floating doughnut hovering over Grand Central. But so far the most thrilling moment was deliver by The Times' architecture critic Michael Kimmelman during a discussion capping day one with the Municipal Art Society's president, Vin Cipolla.

The two of them basically meandered through a bunch of Mr. Kimmelman's columns from his first year on the job, and the first question was about Penn Station, when the critic had the audacity to tell the Dolans to scram. He still believes it is one of the most pressing planning issues in the city all these months after he wrote the piece. "I think there's a hunger to do something about this site, which I think is a blight on millions of people's lives every single day," Mr. Kimmelman explained.

He then mentioned that he was going to the Barclays Center later that night, that he is preparing his response to that project, but first he had a message for the Dolans, who—James Dolan in particular—are not especially well known for heeding the advice of others.

"I just have this feeling that the Dolans, whom I gather are very ambitious and competitive people—I don't know why I think that—are going to discover that they have, despite the money they're pouring into Madison Square Garden, that they have now the worst arena in town," Mr. Kimmelman said, drawing titters from the audience. "Well, they always had the worst arena in town, but now they have the second best, which is also the worst arena."

At this, everyone broke out into full-throated laughter.

Mr. Kimmelman could have left it there, but he went on to reiterate the case he has already made for moving the arena to improve Penn Station—like the Dolans, he is not one to let a subject that is bothering him drop.

"I'm serious in a way about Barclays," Mr. Kimmelman said. "None of this is going to happen or would happen in the next few years. Even if you're looking at this optomistically from the Dolan's perspective, they poured in this money, but amoratizing it over the next decade or 15 years, they may find it's a useful thing, over the next decade or two, to find a new home for the Garden. It's moved many times before. And maybe we can even address this central problem for the development of Midtown West."

It has been a little over a year since Mr. Kimmelman's first column ran in The Times, on the front page no less. In that time, he has covered a lot of territory—perhaps not quite enough, we still wish he wrote more than every few weeks, sometimes even only once every month, but that is largely because he has probably surprised many of his doubters and proven himself to be an extremely capable architecture critic.

It is true, he may not be an architecture critic in the usual mold, but Mr. Kimmelman has proven himself to be one of the foremost advocates for quality design and urbanism at this time. While too many may focus on the sexy rendering, the individual building, Mr. Kimmelman has taken a humanist, global, even universal approach to his job that is as much about making his own impositions on the buildings and places he writes about as on letting those designer and designers impose on him.

Look at what he has come up with this week, not simply another call to arms about what to do with a threatened midcenutry icon in Chicago, the Prenctice Hospital. Instead, he went out and tapped one of Chicago's foremost architects, Jeanne Gang, and challenged her to create a solution. Judging from the local press, while they may bristle at the carpetbagger telling them what to do, the proposal has indeed started a conversation about alternatives to save the hospital and let Northwestern expand all the same.

If anything, Michael Kimmelman is a design advocate, not an architecture critic. That may be just what The Times, and these times, call for.

Update: This just in from Twitter.

@MC_NYC @kimmelman @weareyourfek That comment seems kind. How about "worst arena in the world"?

—
Paul Goldberger (@paulgoldberger) October 19, 2012

Medellin, hotbed of architecture. (ArchDaily)

It’s been more than a month, so that must mean time for another Michael Kimmelman column.

But the latest from The Times’ architecture critic is also his biggest yet—literally and figuratively. We learned back in March, via Twitter, that Mr. Kimmelman was headed to Colombia, to investigate the much-talked about transformation of the once-and-still-somewhat-drug-addled South American country and the critical role good design had played in the changes of the past two decades. On March 31, after five days in Colombia, Mr. Kimmelman declared, "Winding up eye opening trip to Bogota + Medellin—compels total rethink of familiar stories about both. Great architecture to write about."

Indeed. On Sunday, atop the Arts section, a 2,500-word opus appeared on the state of design in Medellin and the health of a city as synonymous with Pablo Escobar as public architecture. The result is the most clear declaration of what could best be considered Michael Kimmelman’s Grand Unifying Theory of Architecture, or The Shortcomings of Popular Design Today. One passage in particular seems to sum it all up rather succinctly:

I arrived in Medellín to see the ambitious and photogenic buildings that have gone up, but also to find what remains undone. The murder rate, while hardly low, is now under 60 per 100,000. Architecture alone obviously doesn’t account for the drop in homicides, but the two aren’t unrelated, either. Around the world, followers of architecture with a capital A have focused so much of their attention on formal experiments, as if aesthetics and social activism, twin Modernist concerns, were mutually exclusive. But Medellín is proof that they’re not, and shouldn’t be. Architecture, here and elsewhere, acts as part of a larger social and economic ecology, or else it elects to be a luxury, meaningless except to itself. Strong words.

You see, us navel-gazing, pay-check-chasing first worlders have long ago forgotten the real purpose of good design.

Still, Mr. Kimmelman tells a compelling story of how social architecture and the public good have combined forces to fight everything from poverty to the drug trade, and the success and shortcomings thereof. Just as often design falls short as it does good.

But of course ownership can’t just be bestowed on poor neighborhoods; it must also be declared, in small, critical ways. In the troubled Comuna 13, two members of Revolución Sin Muertos (Revolution Without Deaths) — started not long ago by a group of neighborhood hip-hoppers rejecting the gang culture — took me on a graffiti tour. At a crowded street corner, Daniel Felipe Quiceno, known as Dog, and Luis Fernando Álvarez, who is called AKA, pointed to a mural of four of their own, murdered by local gangs. Revolución Sin Muertos paints murals around Comuna 13; sometimes residents put their own tags on them, as if to signal support. Murals, Mr. Álvarez said, have helped people here vent frustration and proclaim ownership of the neighborhood.

Progress is hard. Venture a few yards from the heralded new squares, library and cable car stations in the Santo Domingo barrio, across town in the hills of the Northeast district, and it’s clear just how dramatic but also tenuous change is here.

But herein we see the problems with Mr. Kimmelman's tenure as critic underscored, as well. This is a great column, it is broad, expansive and thought provoking, but also kind of light on the architecture. It is about political economics and social mobility as it is about design. In the accompanying slideshow, we see clear evidence of this bias, with a picture of men walking up a long stairway in one of the slums—a counterpoint to the previous picture of a new escalator, perhaps, but still, not what one comes to expect from an architecture review. It feels like this is the work of a foreign correspondent more than an architecture critic.

(These global ambitions might also explain the dearth columns from Mr. Kimmelman. To his credit, he is doing some serious traveling, some serious reporting, some serious thinking, not the kind of work that lends itself to spinning out a review once every week or two. Still, for those looking for that kind of output, it can be frustrating.)

Mr. Kimmelman is right that architects have too often ignored this important part of their work, particularly as they chase the fame and fortune that comes with object making. But it also feels no longer like he is simply ignoring high-design and starchitecture. It now feels like he is openly at war with it.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

I am Kimmelman... I mean Batman. (i09)

Who needs Paul Goldberger and Michael Kimmelman when you have Batman? The Observer knows where we will be on May 30, when three of our favorite things collide: Chip Kidd, Gotham City and architecture criticism.

Mr. Kidd has created a new Batman Graphic novel for DC Comics called Death By Design that he recently previewed with Gawker’s geek webside i09 (we saw it first on Curbed). It’s funny, because the famed book jacket designer and author claims a poverty of ideas on what to write when approached by DC with the offer to pen a comic book when in fact it is clear he knows exactly what he is doing and has come up with one of the best story lines since Grant Morrison’s Arkum Asylum.

I got this extraordinary opportunity where [DC Comics editor] Dan DiDio said, "Do a Batman graphic novel for us." It became a case of the "be-careful-what-you-wish-fors." Even though I'm a lifelong Batman fan, I didn't have the Batman novel in my head I had been dying to write for 20 years. What I came up with first was the title, as it sounded like a story I could bring something to.

I started thinking about living and working in New York, and one of the great tragedies was the destruction of the original Pennsylvania Station in 1963, because it was a beautiful building needlessly torn down. As somebody who has to use the modern Penn Station, it's a horrible, stifling thing, after they threw it in the basement of Madison Square Garden. And there were these Manhattan crane collapses in the spring of 2008. I thought, "How could these two things possibly be related?" Batman is very much about architecture, as he uses the buildings as transportation and defense. Great Batman stories always incorporate architecture in some way, but I hadn't seen a story that particularly dealt with that."There's a cliché that Gotham is "hell opening up on Earth," but that's not the way I approached it. I see the architecture as much more hopeful than a zoning board gone berserk."

Quite delightfully, he goes on to say: "There's a cliché that Gotham is "hell opening up on Earth," but that's not the way I approached it. I see the architecture as much more hopeful than a zoning board gone berserk."

Really does sound like New York.

It’s true that no comic book character is more architectural than Batman (with the possible exception of personal favorite Transmetropolitan). Superman may be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but he does not rely on “the buildings for transportation and defense,” as Mr. Kidd points out Batman does.

Indeed, The Observer was recently taken with the backwards bridges Christopher Nolan blew up in his final installment of the Dark Knight series, a disguise that would be unnecessary in almost any other movie. Aliens and monsters invade New York all the time. To play the part of Gotham, it takes three cities or more.

Nowhere does architecture play quite the role of sidekick as in a good Batman story.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Philip and Thomas chilling out in some architecture. (Liz Arnold/Homebodies)

There has been much brow-wring and hand-furrowing around these parts about the apparent demise of architecture criticism—never mind the fact that capital-a Architecture seems more popular than ever. Well, good news. That most crass of crass real estate sites, our dear friends Curbed, have conscripted not one but two fine architectural writers, now appearing on a rotating basis.

Thomas de Monchaux, the gadabout critic and occasional curator, and his compatriot Philip Nobel, long-rumored to have been Curbed's old Gutter blogger, have joined the good ship, and Mr. Nobel is treading his favorite territory, the World Trade Center, with a lovely inaugural post calling into question the very nature of tall buildings.

How tall is a building? This one should be simple—lay a scale on the architect's drawings, add up a known measure floor-to-floor, read your altimeter, dust off your trigonometry—but it is not so. Begin at the ground, a wavering, unreliable surface prone to dips and peaks. The hillside site of the Empire State Building, for instance, is a good deal higher than the spot maybe a dozen feet above the high tide Hudson from which One World Trade Center (formerly Freedom Tower) gets its start. So if, as reported, a new column installed Monday at Freedom Tower (old habit) has reached 1,271 feet, a tall, multi-story column, necessarily, since it is said to have beat out the Empire State by a whopping 21 feet, that new structure is now higher than the old only if the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street lacks that much in elevation above sea level relative to Ground Zero. As that Midtown site in fact rides at 49 feet above the waves, there's more work to be done downtown.

And on and on he goes. Welcome to the kiddie coral, sir. Things have been too lonely around these parts.

mchaban@observer.com

Tis a far, far better thing I do... (PriceTower.org)

There are two great thrones in American architectural criticism, that of The New Yorker and The New York Times. It was at these two journalistic institutions that the practice was born, at the hands of its king and queen: Lewis Mumford, that great champion of public works and technics, and Ada Louise Huxtable, still the dean of the design press.

Paul Goldberger has been in the fortunate, indeed unique, position of wearing both crowns. After graduating from Yale, he would find himself at The Times in 1973, a young buck roaming the city he loved, engaged to write just about whatever he thought of the buildings and street life therein. He was, quite literally, heir to Ms. Huxtable, who had not yet been pushed out of the paper for her obstreperous ways, and the two of them shared the job of architecture critic for nearly a decade. Two years after she left in 1982, Mr. Goldberger won the Pulitzer for his efforts.

Thirteen years later, in 1997, he would himself depart one side of Times Square for the other, joining The New Yorker, restoring the Sky Line column begun by Mumford half a century earlier at the behest of Tina Brown. "When I went there, I thought it was as perfect a life as you could have," Mr. Goldberger told The Observer in an interview Sunday evening, "to spend half your career at The Times, half at The New Yorker."

But like so many landmarks, from the Parthenon to Penn Station, few endure. Starting today, Mr. Goldberger will board the notorious Condé Nast elevator, but instead of getting off on the 20th floor, he will report to work two floors up, where Graydon Carter has finally poached Mr. Goldberger for Vanity Fair.

"I've known Graydon a long time, and this is something he has talked about for awhile," Mr. Goldberger said. "When he heard I might be leaving the critic's post at The New Yorker, he called again, and things sort of progressed from there."

An unofficial announcement has been making the rounds, as first reported by The Architect's Newspaper, and Mr. Carter praises his latest acquisition as unparalleled, according to a copy obtained by The Observer. “This is an appointment that thrills me profoundly,” Mr. Carter says in the release. “Paul is about as gifted a commentator on architecture, urban planning and design as anyone you’re going to find these days—in other words, he’s just a brilliant writer.” An interview request to Vanity Fair was not immediately returned.

While Mr. Goldberger acknowledged he will miss The New Yorker in some ways, he said it was his decision to leave the magazine, in part so that he would have more time to tackle a biography of Frank Gehry. He said he is very much looking forward to the new possibilities presented by his new publication, for which he has written in the past, "on a one-off basis" starting five years ago. His first effort was a profile of Ralph Lauren, followed by one of Robert A.M. Stern, who had just finished his magisterial 15 Central Park West. (Mr. Goldberger is quick to point out that he reviewed the building for The New Yorker before he wrote about it for the in-house rival.)

"Graydon's eager to do a broad range of things on design and I'm excited to be doing that," Mr. Goldberger said. "And I'm not being coy, we haven't figured out exactly what the parameters are yet, but there will certainly be stories that are design-oriented, not strictly architecture."

That eagerness is not a small reason for Mr. Goldberger decision to leave The New Yorker for Vanity Fair. "David has, I think it's fair to say, mixed feelings about the architecture column," Mr. Goldberger said of New Yorker editor David Remnick. It is a complaint he has aired before, most recently at a panel hosted by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Getting stories into a magazine, especially one that has shrunk considerably in size over the past decade, has become more and more difficult.

Four Times Square, an architectural masterpiece outside and in. (REW)

Indeed, there has not been a single Sky Line column since September 19 of last year, followed by two blog posts over the next week, and nothing since. Of the 14 pieces written last year, out of a total of 178 (according to The New Yorker's online archive) over a 15 year career, only six made it into the magazine—five columns and one Talk piece. Never mind that when you google either "architecture critic" or "architecture criticism," Mr. Goldberger's author page at The New Yorker is the second result, after Wikipedia.

Mr. Goldberger professes no animosity toward his former boss, and indeed said this has been one of his best and most productive working relationships. "David was great, just great," Mr. Goldberger said. "But change is good, too. I love The New Yorker, I like Vanity Fair, and I like the possibilities, which seem a lot broader than at The New Yorker."

Much of this is to do with the changing nature of publication, at Condé and beyond, the wealth of opinion online, the dearth of magazine pages, and so on. When was the last time you read a Joan Acocella review? And no, not one of those frivolous Critics Notebook pieces in the front of the book—which Ms. Acocella is at least fortunate enough to have to keep her busy every week or two. The answer is mid-January. Alex Ross is a little more lucky, managing a review of classical music at least once a month, plus regular blogging.

Mr. Goldberger is not alone in this, as his chief rival, The Times' newly coronated Michael Kimmelman, has been a less regular feature in the newspaper's pages than many had hoped. But at least The Times, which was criticized for appointing a non-expert to this important post, has not given up on the beat entirely. The New Yorker just may have, as there is no apparent replacement lined up for Mr. Goldberger. Any design writing, be it on IKEA, America's next top starchitect or tiny houses is likely to appear in the well of the magazine, not the back of the book. As of this publication, Mr. Remnick could not be reached for comment.

The absence of an architecture critic from the hallowed halls of Eustace Tilley Inc. is not actually as wretched as it sounds. Despite the prominence of Mr. Goldberger and Mumford before him, that is nearly the extent of architecture criticism at the magazine. Sure, New Yorker icon Brendan Gill took up the mantel near the end of his career, in the 1980s and '90s, but like Mr. Kimmelman (and Mumford) he was more of an enthusiast than a professional, like Mr. Goldberger, who has also taught architecture for years and briefly served as the dean of Parsons.

For his part, Mr. Goldberger said he is looking forward to his new gig and the flexibility being a Vanity Fair contributing editor will afford him, particularly to work on that biography of Frank Gehry. "It's a shitload of work," Mr. Goldberger said. "I've never written anything like this before, and I'm quickly realizing that writing a biography is going to take up a lot of time and energy."

That said, he still expects to write a number of things for Vanity Fair this year. But with the April issue already on newsstands, and production so many months in advance, how long will we actually have to wait for Mr. Goldberger to file his first piece?

In his first proper review for The Times, a piece on the then-new One Police Plaza published on October 27, 1973, Mr. Goldberger opened dramatically, as he often does: "Designing a building for the city of New York is the sort of nightmare that makes architects wonder why they didn't go into some easier profession, like neurosurgery."

The same might be said in some way about the business of architecture criticism these days.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Still calling the shots.

Michael Kimmelman is not a very good architecture critic, at least that is what some of his critics would have you believe. As invigorating as his first few columns championing urbanism and public design were, the whole thrust has devolved into a sort of schtick, whereby every article is about the greatness of cities, and barely about architecture.

Michael Kimmelman knows this.

At a talk at Columbia earlier this week, The Times’ architectural annointer said he would be getting to buildings soon enough, according to The Architect’s Newspaper, though he also refused to talk about them in the same old way. He is used to hearing the complaint “When is he going to write about…” project X or Y.

Kimmelman addressed growing criticism of his focus on the city as a whole as opposed to addressing architecture as buildings, by reminding the audience that he’s only been at the gig for four months and still had plenty to address. He said he had hoped to create a more porous and fluid forum for debate about the city and architecture, through blogs and reader commentary—but that the resources to edit and filter comments at the newspaper are thin, and there was a concern that the blog could be “taken over by crazy people.”

He added that Ada Louise Huxtable remains the model for dealing with citywide and policy issues alongside architecture. “A false dichotomy has been set up; there’s this idea that writing about urban affairs and architecture are separate,” he said. “They’re part of the same world.”

And it is true, he has written a great deal about specific projects, so the critics must be wrong. Via Verde becomes an exploration of affordable housing, Discovery Center library the nature of public architecture, the Madrid Río the nature of financing public architecture. The more amorphous, anarchitectural essays remain, those on bike lanes and trees and protest space, but for it all there are gems like his brilliant proposal for moving Madison Square Garden to the site of the Javits Center, thereby delivering a proper Penn Station along the way.

Mr. Kimmelman made clear at the Columbia panel that this is the path he intends to continue on. Were he to write about Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI Museum in Rome, he told the audience that it would be about whether or not it transformed the derelict neighborhood in which it was built, the ostensible reason for the museum, not whether it was a successful museum in-and-of itself. Though presumably that would be addressed as well.

It is a new and bracing way to write about architecture. In the past, the museum would likely have been compared to others of its ilk, alongside MoMA, the Guggenheim Bilbao, maybe Daniel Libeskind's severe Denver Art Museum. It is peg versus peg.

Kimmelman seems to care very little for these games and would rather focus on whether or not that peg fits into the hole into which it has been placed, something that really does not happen enough. The only problem is it can lead to articles that read quite a lot alike. At least that is the superficial reading.

Nevermind the fact that there are myriad projects waiting to be weighed in on—the new apartments at Atlantic Yards, or the ones at Brooklyn Bridge Park, or Frank Gehry's new Signature Theater all come to mind. Far be it from us to give marching orders to Mr. Kimmelman, but the people are dying to know what he thinks, and these are all still projects that could be considered in the lens of cities, too.

The reason is, for better or worse, The Times sets the standard.

That was the repeated lament of a panel held at the Center for Architecture last week. Simply consider this exchange between Paul Goldberger, ex-Timesman (where he won the Pullitzer) and current New Yorker critic, and Cathleen McGuigan, lead scribe for Architectural Record.

“I know The New Yorker under David Remnick is particularly interested in the new,” Goldberger said. “And over the years I’ve been under pressure from time to time to write about some things before The New York Times had it. David’s level of interest rose in proportion to—in inverse proportion to the presence of something in The New York Times. If The New York Times had not covered it yet, and did not appear to be likely to cover it soon, he became more interested and more engaged.

“I like to be first; it feels good, but at the end of the day I think it’s more important to have confidence in your ability to say things better, or differently, or in your own way, than to be first—I don’t think readers keep score about that the way editors can keep score about that. Editors keep score about that, but I don’t think readers do.”

“It’s a terrible problem,” McGuigan said, referring to her tenure at Newsweek, “because I was under so much pressure to not be beaten by Time, or The New York Times, that I really felt I had sometimes covered things that really weren’t cooked yet.”

The irony is that Mr. Kimmelman's trend away from the new should open his colleagues up to fertile territory—Bloomberg has been the only major outlet to write about the Signature, an unthinkable reality a few years ago. And yet somehow, they cannot gravitate away from The Times.

None of us can.

The fact remains, a building has not been judged unless, until The Times has leveled its judgment.

Come Monday, it will have been a month since Mr. Kimmelman's last column, the one about the trees in Central Park. What's next, and when? The anticipation is killing us.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Page 1, baby!

This morning, The Observer awakened to something many in the architecture community have been waiting months, if not years for. By the time you read this, the moment may have already passed online. But even if readers missed that frisson of joy in finding Michael Kimmelman's first proper architecture review on the The New York Times' homepage, as much, or even more excitement can be had with an actual hard copy of the paper, where the review managed to sneak its way onto the front page.

Sure, it's below the fold, but still, the last time The Times ran an architecture review on the front page of the paper was the last correspondence of Mr. Kimmelman's oft-maligned predecessor, Niccolai Ouroussoff, and even then it was simply a teaser in that little box at the bottom of the page. This is an honest-to-god story, picture and all, on some of the most sacred journalistic territory on the planet. Does this mean The Times is actually putting more emphasis on its architecture reviewing, not less, as some had complained when Mr. Kimmelman, an erudite consumer of culture, but still one with no official architectural training? Is this an honor paid to all first-time critics, which Mr. Kimmelman isn't, really, since he's been reviewing this-and-that for decades? Was it simply a slow news day? 

Which is not to suggest that this is not a remarkable piece of writing deserving of its top billing, nor to take anything away from the talented Mr. Kimmelman, who has had his fair share of front pages over the years. Consider what he, and The Times, have done here, though. This is a review of a public housing complex designed by notable but far from famous architects—in the South Bronx, no less. It is not the latest bauble from from some boldfaced jetsetter. Indeed, Mr. Kimmelman attacks this very type of design in the third paragraph of his piece, in what seems to be, one might hope, a declaration of principles for the future of his work:

The rebirth of the South Bronx isn’t news. But Via Verde is. And it makes as good an argument as any new building in the city for the cultural and civic value of architecture. The profession, or in any case much talk about it, has been fixated for too long on brand-name luxury objects and buildings as sculptures instead of attending to the richer, broader, more urgent vein of public policy and community engagement, in which aesthetics play a part.

Are you listening, Frank Gehry?

And yet the piece serves also as a critique not only of the architectural media but also of architecture, its social and political realities, and how they might be fixed, or even if they can be.

Thousands of homeless families and others waiting for decent homes need those apartments. Higher costs for green construction have, over recent years, come to be accepted as investments in long-term savings. But spending extra for anything as intangible as elegance or architectural distinction? In Via Verde’s case maybe 5 percent more, by Mr. Rose’s estimate, went into the project’s roof and its fine, multipanel, multicolor facade, with big windows, sunshades and balconies. What is the value of architectural distinction? How, morally speaking, can it be weighed against the need for homes?

In the end, Mr. Kimmelman determines, quite rightly, that "Bad designs, demolished after 20 years, as so many ill-conceived housing projects have been, are the costliest propositions in the end."

Perhaps this is why the story made it to the front page, because it is not a Metro story or an Arts story—which so rarely get to the cover of the national edition of The New York Times—but it is instead something bigger. Mr. Kimmelman could have made his first review of Jean Nouvel's new carousel shed in Dumbo, or Mr. Gehry's soon-to-open Signature Theater (he'll get to it closer to the opening curtain, we're sure) or even one of those European wonders he has come to know so well during his time Abroad.

Instead we get an utterly New York story that is utterly international in scope and ambition, a call to arms of the sort that has been missing for to long in the pages of The Times and even architectural criticism at large. (We're not counting you, Justin Davidson.)

According to Times culture editor Jonathan Landman, it is exactly this statement of purpose that got Mr. Kimmelman onto the front of the paper. He emails:

In general, it's certainly unusual for any review to run on Page 1. It does happen, but not often, and when it does it's usually because the thing reviewed is momentous in some way. For example: Michael's review of "The Gates" in Central Park, a huge public event.

So then it is saying something that a South Bronx housing project is now a "huge public event." Like we said, this is good news. Here is how Mr. Landman sees it:

In this case, Michael had some things to say about the approach he will take to this beat that I and my bosses thought were worth amplifying. The old-writer-new-mantle thing played a part, but there's certainly no guarantee that a writer gets a Page 1 story when he or she switches beats.

He also notes that Mr. Ouroussoff had a run of four front page stories last fall, when he did a series on the Middle East. Important, but not exactly New York. As for the former critic and his replacement, Mr. Landman had this to say about Mr. Kimmelman's qualifications, something that had been openly discussed but never answered by anyone at The Times, as far as we know:

As to Michael's experience, it is of course true that he is not a career architecture critic but he has written about architecture. More important, he is a brilliant critic with a longstanding interest in the field. He is also a spectacular reporter who can learn anything and a man with more than enough intellectual humility to know what he doesn't know. There's value in his non-insider perspective, I believe.

Nor is this about Nicolai. He was a fine and serious critic with his own interests, sensibility and preoccupations. Critics are entitled to have those. Michael looks at things differently, and said so. Page 1 helps readers get that message.

We got the message. Let's just hope he keeps it up.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC