London has had barriers on the Thames since 1984. (Getty)

It's starting to seem like Mayor Bloomberg is the only one who doesn't think storm barriers are a worthwhile investment. Not only do Governor Cuomo, MTA chief Joe Lhota and both Jerry Nadler and Chuck Schumer think it's a good idea, but so do 80 percent of New York City voters, according to a new Quinnipiac poll out today.

They were asked, specifically, if it was worth spending billions—no exact amount, or source of funds beyond the federal and state governments was given—on new waterfront infrastructure. Only 14 percent thought it was not worth the cost. Support was even higher when the pollsters asked if the cost was justified it if the storm protections could "reduce the cost of disruption and restoration." Then, 88 percent supported the new infrastructure, compared to 6 percent who did not support.

But the whole "worth it" debate is at the heart of the issue. Mayor Bloomberg has said time and again he does not believe sufficient protections could be built, at least at a cost making such efforts worth it. One person who believes this will happen anyway, because of American political vagaries, good and ill, is Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman.

Hurricane Sandy was a toll paid for procrastination. The good news? We don’t need to send a bunch of Nobel laureates into the desert now, hoping they come up with some new gizmo to save the planet. Solutions are at hand. Money shouldn’t be a problem either, considering the hundreds of billions of dollars, and more lives, another Sandy or two will cost.

So the problem is not technological or, from a long-term cost-benefit perspective, financial.

Rather it is the existential challenge to the messy democracy we’ve devised. The hardest part of what lies ahead won’t be deciding whether to construct Eiffel Tower-size sea walls across the Verrazano Narrows and Hell Gate, or overhauling the city’s sewage and storm water system, which spews toxic waste into rivers whenever a couple of inches of rain fall because the sea levels have already risen so much. These are monumental tasks.

But more difficult still will be staring down the pain, dislocation and inequity that promise to upend lives, undo communities and shake assumptions about city life and society. More than requiring the untangling of colossal red tape, saving New York and the whole region for the centuries ahead will become a test of civic unity.

So while Mr. Kimmelman agrees with the majority that big infrastructure must be built, he also agrees with the mayor, that so, too, must smart construction—or no construction. "At this point there’s no logic, politics and sentiment aside, to FEMA simply rebuilding single-family homes on barrier islands like the Rockaways, where they shouldn’t have been built in the first place, and like bowling pins will tumble again after the next hurricane strikes."

Still, tell that to all the people whose lives have been upended by the storm. It will be like swallowing a bitter pill after be socked in the stomach.

Never forget. (Getty)

Want to pitch in on the Sandy recovery and get in touch with your design-y, wonk-y self? Then head over to the Center for Architecture in the Village tonight, where Michael Kimmelman will host a panel of experts to debate the future of the city after Superstorm Sandy. The event is free, but there is a suggested donation of $10. All proceeds will go to the Mayor's Fund for New York, which has been raising money since the storm hit to help with the recovery effort. Full details below.

This fundraiser will feature thoughtful discussion between leaders in disaster resilience design.

DATE: TONIGHT, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2012
TIME: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
LOCATION: Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY 10012

ADMISSION: Event is open to the public; suggested donation: $10
All contributions will be donated to the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City to support Superstorm Sandy relief efforts.

Moderator: Michael Kimmelman, Chief Architecture Critic, The New York Times

Speakers:
Cynthia Barton - Disaster Housing Plan Manager, NYC Office of Emergency Management (OEM)
Stephen Cassell, AIA, LEED AP - Principal, Co-Founder, Architecture Research Office (ARO)
Klaus Jacob - Geophysicist, Urban Environmental Disaster Expert, Columbia University (SIPA, EI/LDEO)
Rob Rogers, FAIA - Principal, Rogers Marvel Architects
Howard Slatkin - Director of Sustainability, NYC Department of City Planning
Donna Walcavage, FASLA, LEED AP - Principal/Vice President, AECOM

Organized by: AIA New York and the Center for Architecture Foundation

Supported by: AIANY Design for Risk and Reconstruction Committee (DfRR) and the AIANY Committee on the Environment (COTE)

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

A dream on a hill. (Domus)

Mr. Piano with his clients. (Arch Record)

Since the beginning, there was a certain amount of awe at Michael Kimmelman’s rejection of the boldface designers and celebrity architects that make up the world of starchitecture. There was little sign of the flash and panache that had defined architecture criticism in the pages of The Times for many moons. In fact things were quite gritty, even grim, if uplifting in their earnest and realism. By and large, the city(s) and profession has been better off for Mr. Kimmelman’s critical eye.

Still, there has been a clamoring in many quarters for more. At times it felt like Mr. Kimmelman was ignoring certain notable projects worthy of, even demanding notice. There have been but a dozen newsworthy developments in New York alone, from the Signature Theater to Brooklyn Bridge Park. What did Mr. Kimmelman—really, what did The Times, what did the paper of record, the voice of god--think of these important projects? With the exception of the divisive NYU expansion, to which Mr. Kimmelman had an ingenious (and thus far ignored) solution, we still do not know.

But now, at least, he has graced us, after seven months on the job, with his thoughts on one of the world’s most renowned architects. Well, two of them actually, Renzo Piano’s thoughtful-if-controversial addition to LeCorbusier’s chapel of Notre Dame du Haut. The result is a religious experience.

A few minor acoustic problems with the nuns’ concrete quarters aside, Mr. Piano and his team (Paul Vincent was the partner in charge at Renzo Piano Building Workshop) have created remarkably light and peaceful spaces that are virtually invisible from the chapel and gracefully connected to nature. Competing with Le Corbusier’s masterwork would have been a fool’s game and an affront, Mr. Piano clearly realized; spoiling it, a cinch. Doing neither, the additions insert new life onto the hill, and in the process remove a despised 1960s gatehouse that had obscured sight of the chapel from the town below.

Humility is a virtue. That’s the obvious lesson, but doing anything, even constructing a few self-effacing buildings at Ronchamp, is a big deal. Mr. Piano solved the riddle of adding to a site without appearing conspicuously to do so by burrowing into the brow of the hill, below the chapel, and inserting the convent and visitors’ center into the cuts, half buried, with zinc-and-glass facades to let in light. He placed the visitors’ center beside the old pilgrims’ path, which winds through woods from the valley all the way up the hill, and adjacent to a parking lot, which has been usefully trimmed.

A fire was crackling in the fireplace at the center when I stopped by to browse through the bookshop. A ramp led from there onto the dirt path rising to the chapel. Behind the opposite end of the visitors’ center, set apart by a tiny gate, the convent wrapped several hundred feet farther around the slope.

A fire was crackling in the fireplace!

Perhaps this is what is so compelling about Mr. Kimmelman. Even when he is considering famous objet d'architecture, it is still in terms of their humanity. He cares about the little things and little people, how a building is lived and experience, not What It Means (unless we're talking about what it means for humanity, and particularly for the city in which said building is found).

Notice that he talks to all the nuns, shares their experiences, as he recently did in a Parisian affordable housing complex. He is as much a reporter and an anthropologist as an architecture critic. He even goes so far as to name-check the partner in charge of the project and the landscape architect, a sharing of the spotlight that would have been unthinkable in the past.

Compare this to Mr. Kimmelman's predecessor and, say, his review of the CCTV Building, "the greatest building of this century" in Nicolai Ouroussoff's estimation:

Yet for all that, the CCTV headquarters may be the greatest work of architecture built in this century. Mr. Koolhaas, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, has always been interested in making buildings that expose the conflicting energies at work in society, and the CCTV building is the ultimate expression of that aim, beginning with the slippery symbolism of its exterior. At moments monumental and combative, at others strangely elusive, almost retiring, it is one of the most beguiling and powerful works I’ve seen in a lifetime of looking at architecture.

What grabs the imagination as much as anything is the vision the building offers of this particular period in history. Mr. Koolhaas has created an eloquent architectural statement about China’s headlong race into the future and, more generally, life in the developed world at the beginning of the 21st century. It captures our era much as the great works of the early Modernists did theirs.

These are Big Ideas for Big Buildings. But you cannot inhabit an idea or a movement or a gesture. This is something Mr. Kimmelman seems to grasp that few others do.

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

This'll do. (City Review)

Michael Kimmelman returned to the public realm for this week's column, where he all but declared what appears to be his raison d'etre going forward: "We’ve been so fixated on fancy new buildings that we’ve lost sight of the spaces they occupy and we share," he wrote in the Sunday Times. But instead of Zuccotti Park and protest spaces, this time Mr. Kimmelman turns his attention on Midtown, where he ambles about with the esteemed planner (and mayoral soothsayer) Alexander Garvin.

Together, they argue that the city needs to do more to plan these spaces, which are largely designed ad hoc, if at all, by the developers who own the properties. They point to Holland, that godhead of urban enlightenment, as a prime example from which to learn:

The Dutch today put together what they call “structure plans” when they undertake big new public projects, like their high-speed rail station in Rotterdam: before celebrity architects show up, urban designers are called in to work out how best to organize the sites for the public good. It’s a formalized, fine-grained approach to the public realm. By contrast, big urban projects on the drawing board in New York still tend to be the products of negotiations between government agencies anxious for economic improvement and private developers angling for zoning exemptions. As with the ill-conceived Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, the streets, subway entrances and plazas around Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, where millions of New Yorkers will actually feel the development’s effects, seem like they’ve hardly been taken into account.

It is a very good point, one the developers would no doubt argue against, even if it is for their own good. Look no further than the High Line, which has been a boon to development in Chelsea, even if the landlords betwixt the elevated park fought for its demolition for years. Messrs. Kimmelman and Garvin raise the potential of closing 33rd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, a measure that would no doubt be fought just as hard as the proposal to close 34th Street, which was defeated earlier this year.

And yet consider the success of Times Square and Broadway, which have seen retail rents rise and public satisfaction grow. Like a temperamental child, builders and landlords do not always know what is best for them. By making the space surrounding their buildings more appealing, the buildings themselves will rise in value. The rise of quality architecture and sustainable design only underscore this fact. People will pay for quality, especially in a city with such high demand for property like New York.

Far superior—and developer-built in Williamsburg, no less. (WaterfrontCondo.wordpress.com)

The Observer is reminded of something Mitchell Moss, the N.Y.U. open space guru, has told us on more than one occasion, that the city should be building neither roads nor bike lanes but instead expanding the sidewalks. This is our front yard, he likes to say. (Again, cf. Times Square.) But it is also important that these lawns on not weedy and full of crab grass.

Given the right constraints, however, the city's developers can actually do good. Even if Atlantic Yards will be a public space disaster as Mr. Kimmelman seems to suggest, Bruce Ratner has pushed his architects at SHoP to create the best space around his arena possible, even if it is not nearly enough space.

Things have been getting better, too. Messrs. Kimmelman and Garvin point to the Citicorp plaza, built in the late 1970s as a decent model, while the one across the street, is not, but keep in mind that the new public plazas tend to outshine the old, which were first inaugurated in the 1960s. Then again, august examples exist as well, such as Rockefeller Center or the Seagram Building, so developers do not always follow the best leads.

That is where the city comes in.  The Williamsburg waterfront, derided in an aside by Mr. Kimmelman, has actually shown a great deal of promise. The waterfront esplanades and open space surrounding the buildings there have become popular destinations, jam packed with fisherman, flea markets and, most recently ferry goers. The problems actually lie with the spaces the city has tried to create, such as Bushwick Inlet Park, a sizable waterfront complex that has languished due to budget constraints. Is privatization of the public realm good? Rarely, though it does have its merits.

At the Edge, Northside Piers and 184 Kent Street, a genuine waterfront is blossoming. It may lack the grandeur of the centrally planned Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the lampposts and benches might not match, but it still follows strict guidelines set up by the city that have created an inviting public realm. It is a hodgepodge, but so is New York.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Architecture. (Getty)

The Observer was beginning to suffer withdrawal. It had been more than two weeks since Michael Kimmelman filed his last piece for The Times Art Section, after a run of nearly one architecture review a week. We should have seen his latest one coming, but The Observer must admit that we did not.

It is not simply because defining bike lanes as architecture could be a subject open for debate, at least under Mr. Kimmelman’s starchiest-loving predecessor (to be fair, he did write about the Time Square pedestrian plazas) but also because the Gray Lady has not exactly been a friend to the cycling movement, consistently criticizing the godhead Janette Sadik-Khan.

But for Mr. Kimmelman, recently returned from Europe, cycling is almost a perfect conveyance.

I know how this happens from living in Berlin the past few years. I came to love to run errands there on my bike, to take my younger son to the aquarium and just to find excuses to ride through Treptow Park to watch old Berliners dance with hipsters on the riverside veranda of an ancient beer garden.

New York is not Berlin or Amsterdam, but London has lately turned into a bike capital too, in conjunction with a traffic-congestion fee program for drivers of the sort that New York was wrong to reject recently. It’s now common around Sloane Square and Piccadilly Circus to find parents with children and businessmen and businesswomen commuting on bicycles. Safety in numbers, Londoners have discovered: a city reaches a tipping point when biking achieves what Ms. Sadik-Khan describes as an everyday “architecture of safety.”

There we go, architecture, and a special breed at that. Mr. Kimmelman is absolutely right, though. He has sold us once again, not only on the architectural nature of bike lanes but their important place in a vibrant city. Lanes are, in a sense, architecture because like any important infrastructure, they are capable of transforming the built environment, just like any exquisite building.

In a follow-up blog post, we learn of Mr. Kimmelman’s childhood accident, that turned him off to biking for some time. Were it not for the bike lanes, one wonders if he would bike, or bike as much. It is good that he can, and that others are following suit. “On a bike time bends,” he writes. “Space expands and contracts.”

It is a shame more cannot enjoy it.

I am even more surprised by how many New Yorkers oppose the lanes because they drive or because they imagine the lanes are mainly for reckless delivery men. Never mind that those men are often rushing Kung Pao chicken to those same bike-lane-averse New Yorkers, who stiff them on tips if their takeout doesn’t arrive yesterday.

Yet again, Mr. Kimmelman is engaging with public architecture. He will have to assess the institutional, for-profit variety sometime, and we suspect it will be have to be soon. After all, he is running out of city commissioners to confab with, having already spent time with Amanda Burden, Matthew Wambua, David Burney and now Janette Sadik-Khan. Perhaps a review of prison architecture is in the offing? Or the new CityBench? What corner of city life remains unreflected on by Mr. Kimmelman?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Everyone's favorite slum! (Cooper-Hewitt)

So far Michael Kimmelman has delivered his thoughts on how to build better public housing developments, how to build better libraries, how to build better civic architecture in general. He steps away from praising the Bloomberg administration for a bit in his two latest dispatches, but the message remains pleasantly the same: architecture is everywhere, and it has a special power to shape our lives. Even those hippies down on Wall Street get it.

Kent State, Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall: we clearly use locales, edifices, architecture to house our memories and political energy. Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations.

So we check in on Facebook and Twitter, but make pilgrimages to Antietam, Auschwitz and to the Acropolis, to gaze at rubble from the days of Pericles and Aristotle.

I thought of Aristotle, of all people, while I watched the Zuccotti Park demonstrators hold one of their “general assemblies” the other day. In his “Politics,” Aristotle argued that the size of an ideal polis extended to the limits of a herald’s cry. He believed that the human voice was directly linked to civic order. A healthy citizenry in a proper city required face-to-face conversation.

Aristotle? That’s a down-right Muschampian reference. Mr. Kimmelman is really catching on.

Joking aside, though, his point about “the common ground” of protest is an enlightening one. After all, the Occupy Wall Street protests are probably the first ones made possible by a zoning loophole. It has brought attention not only to POPS, a term that had heretofore been absent from the city’s lexicon, but the developers behind them, the very way they build the city, and how we come to inhabit it.

But not everybody has it as good as those yupsters with their cardboard signs. What about the slums and favelas and banlieues the world over, the lifeblood of globalism? They can benefit from some smart design, too, as Mr. Kimmelman celebrates while walking through the United Nations. He is actually there for an expansion of the Cooper-Hewitt show "Design With the Other 90 Percent: Cities," which first opened in 2007 as "Design for the Other 90 Percent." The ways in which slums around the world are being reborn, and saving their inhabitants, is the focus this time.

While he may not realize he is making the point, it strikes The Observer that, in some small way, the 90 percent has it a bit better than the rest of us when it comes to design.

The 2007 exhibition set the stage for this larger undertaking about whole cities, which couldn’t be timelier. We live in an era of unprecedented urban migration. Ms. Smith mentioned the billion people living in informal settlements, or slums. That number is projected to double by 2030, triple by 2050, according to the United Nations Human Settlements Program. By then one of three people on the planet will supposedly be living in favelas in Brazil, barrios in Ecuador, shack settlements in South Africa, bidonvilles in Tunisia or chapros in Nepal — the names are nearly as endless as the number of these sprawling, unplanned, impoverished places.

Ms. Smith spent a couple of years seeing what designers have been doing to improve living conditions in them. As at Bang Bua, one lesson seems strikingly obvious: the need to solicit the people living in poverty to come up with their own solutions. In so many slums — Dharavi in Mumbai, India; Corail in Bangladesh; Cape Town, South Africa; and in American cities too — the poor are left out of the process. But urban-renewal projects always work best when they’re ground up, not top down.

Would we want to live in any of these places? Of course not. But in New York, where so many developments are fait accompli, it is intriguing to know that there are others enjoying a better process just as they work toward a better life.

At the end of his review, Mr. Kimmelman informs us that he is hoping to check out "a few of the cities the show celebrates, to see how they’re doing, firsthand." This is wonderful news, more contemplative, conscious criticism. But The Observer is actually starting to pine for a time when Mr. Kimmelman might actually pick up one of those starchitect-y projects his predecessor so loved. A plain vanilla review of a building based purely on aesthetic grounds—it's what we'd come to expect from The Times and what we figured we would get from its newest architecture critic. He has surprised and yet not dissappointed, but after all these hearty meals, how about a little dessert?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC