His writing has a patient, deliberate quality that is rare at a moment when the dominant medium of architectural discourse is Twitter. Perhaps this is why Mr. Rybczynski, despite himself, is suddenly all the rage. — nytimes.com

Inga Saffron, who writes the "Changing Skyline" column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism this week.

She talks with Dave Heller about the state of criticism today, and the changing attitudes towards cities. — newsworks.org

Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron on Monday won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

In its citation, the Pulitzer Committee cited Saffron "for her criticism of architecture that blends expertise, civic passion and sheer readability into arguments that consistently stimulate and surprise." — philly.com

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

Henry Hope Reed, an architecture critic and historian whose ardent opposition to modernism was purveyed in books, walking tours of New York City and a host of curmudgeonly barbs directed at advocates of the austere, the functional and unornamented in public buildings and spaces, died Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97. — nytimes.com

vado retro summed up the design "a box within a box and one box the one inside, the inside box is at an angle. oh and there are trees" but Alex Gomez added "Although the facade is superficial, I feel it will succeed in attracting ‘qualitative and quantitative tourist flows in the area,’

Ada Louise Huxtable, the dean of American architecture critics, died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. She was 91. — online.wsj.com

Buildings are discussed — indeed aspects of them obsessed upon — but almost exclusively in the context of economics. This building went over budget, that surplus of houses led to the foreclosure crisis, that condo broke the record for residential real estate, etc. To the layman, then, architecture is conveyed as little more than something that costs a lot and causes a lot of grief, rather than something with the potential to enhance our daily lives. — New York Times

The underwater mortgages and overleveraged loans that underlie this latest great contraction result in significant part from valuing both residential and commercial buildings merely as investment vehicles rather than as complex and consequential things-in-the-world. And on this urgent issue, which places buildings at the very center of key political and economic debates, architecture critics have been mostly missing in action. — Places

Times Culture Editor Jonathan Landman: 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. — 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