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MAS is proud to announce that Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic of The New York Times, has been named the winner of the 2014 Brendan Gill Prize. [...]
The jury singled out Kimmelman’s exceptional coverage of the challenges posed by an overstressed Penn Station, challenging New Yorkers and their regional neighbors to no longer settle for anything less than planning and design excellence that befits the busiest transportation hub in North America.
— The Municipal Art Society of New York
Any definitive insight into the formative stages of Roman architectural hubris lies irretrievable beneath layers of the city’s repeated renovations through the time of caesars, popes and the Renaissance [...] Now, at excavations 11 miles east of Rome’s city center, archaeologists think they are catching a glimpse of Roman tastes in monumental architecture much earlier than previously thought, about 300 years before the Colosseum. — nytimes.com
The New York Times recently reported on the ongoing excavations of Roman monumental remnants from the city's pre-Colosseum era at the Gabii digging site not far from the capital. Since last summer, a team of archaeologists and University of Michigan students led by classical studies... View full entry
“Ultimately people can’t get around conveniently because they are far away from everything.” And it is this observation that for me epitomizes the problem of the driverless car — it’s the worst kind of solutionism. By becoming so enamored with how technology might transform the car, we’ve neglected to adequately explore how getting rid of cars might transform how and where we live. We’d do well to heed Gorz’s exhortation to “never make transportation an issue by itself.” — opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
It's a given that America continues to be a car-obsessed society despite the more painstaking reality of driving a car in many major cities of today. In The New York Times, editor Allison Arieff of SPUR points out that the U.S. is still fixated on selling, using and enhancing the car when... View full entry
This puzzle appeared in the October 7 issue of T Design (page 60) in The New York Times. — blog.dwr.com
Click here to download the printable PDF version. View full entry
IT has become fashionable in many architectural circles to declare the death of drawing. What has happened to our profession, and our art, to cause the supposed end of our most powerful means of conceptualizing and representing architecture?
The computer, of course.
— nytimes.com
Michael Graves pens an opinion piece for the Times. View full entry
Mr. Landman views these attempts at defining the critic’s frame of reference — Kimmelman-style and Scott-style — as entirely appropriate. Critics, he said, are not supposed to be objective; they are free to champion certain kinds of work. They are “free to like or dislike anyone or anything.” — NYT
Arthur S. Brisbane, (the Public Editor) provides some insight into the workings of the NYT Arts section. He spoke with Jonathan Landman, The Times’s culture editor, in an effort to better understand the rules that The Times plays by. Specifically, when it comes to the New York... View full entry
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.
— observer.com
What, exactly, should the Times' new architecture critic be writing about? Something, his fellow critics agree. View full entry
We are looking at the work of very good if far from famous architects doing remarkable work right here at home—not starchitects toiling away on the other side of the planet, cooking up schemes that may well never get built. [...] It was not that long ago that Mr. Kimmelman was writing a column called "Abroad," dealing with artistic matters in Europe. Now, here he is, plying local waters, reminding the world [New York[ is still the place to be and build. — New York Observer
Ada Louise has a voice (acerbic defender of the city); Goldberger has a voice (the artful company man); Muschamp had a voice (champion of glamour). Nicolai, alas, has no voice. Kimmelman will need to stake out some critical territory for himself, a voice on the subject. … — Observer
Ms. Julie Iovine an ex editor of NYT's Home Magazine whose quotes were relied upon in this article, noted “There’s a worry now, that someone who is known as an art critic—an appraiser of the object—will be tempted to also treat architecture as an object. It ain’t so!... View full entry
New York Times art critic and "Abroad" columnist Michael Kimmelman will become the paper's new architecture critic, the Times is announcing today. — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com
According to an in-house memo, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff is “moving on” at the end of this month.
The sweet but short memo about the critic—who this year submitted his own Pulitzer nomination package—was sent around this morning from culture editor Jonathan Landman.
— Archpaper
Despite the reassuring rivets in the 1,500-pound glass panels, the calm stillness of the air at the Windy City’s pinnacle and the security of a 10,000-pound weight capacity for each of the four 4.3-foot-deep glass boxes that protrude past the sheer edge of the Western Hemisphere’s tallest building — despite all that, you still feel twinges of queasiness. — nytimes.com
Most of these units have never sold, and though they were finished just three years ago, they are already falling into disrepair, the concrete chipping off the sides of the buildings. Vandals have stolen piping, radiators, doors — anything they could get their hands on. — nytimes.com
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans). — nytimes.com
