worth spending a whole salary on an architecture critic.However, Kimmelman has created a socially-oriented oeuvre that not only recognizes Architectures lofty goals, but harks back to old-school Huxtable: it defends the rights of the city-goer. Just look at his seminal piece on Penn Station, Restore A Gateway to Dignity, in which he begins from the perspective of the New Yorker:To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New Yorks exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation.Kimmelman sets us up beautifully. From the beginning we viscerally understand the problem : the human beings in Penn Station arent passers-by reveling in their environment, but humiliated commuters crawling through a dank, urban underbelly.Michael Kimmelman's Plan for Penn Station The New York Timesver tambemMore than making the experience understandable, more than explaining how the architecture has completely failed its purpose and degraded the human spirit, Kimmelman does something much more important here he offers a practical solution.He suggests moving Madison Square Garden to where the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center currently sits, giving the Garden a coveted riverfront location and New Yorks commuters the space for the lighter, ennobling Penn Station they need.In his piece on the NYU: 2031 Expansion plans, he suggests letting NYU build their large multi-purpose tower, the Zipper, but also suggests where you could create a park to provide the green, public spaces that the inhabitants of Grenwich Village lack.This is what makes a great Kimmelman article great not just his ability to connect to us, but to suggest the compromises that will instigate debate and conversation, to offer solutions that inspire us to improve our cities for all.The Critic as Activist.From the Arts, to the Front PageWhile the archetype Architect Critic, as we knew him, was stodgy, starchitect-obsessed, and content to let his prose be as impenetrable as possible, he was at least a filter. He determined what was worthy of discussion, what we should be talking about.And while the boom of design blogs and architectural web sites (this one included) lets us know that Architecture has not ceased to be relevant on the contrary, it has become far more central to our daily lives the lack of a critical voice means that we have compromised discernment for speed, quality for quantity.In Goldbergers experience: The New Yorker under David Remnick is particularly interested in the new, and over the years Ive been under pressure [...] to write about some things before The New York Times had it.Since Architecture is alive, well, and thriving, I believe this is the key to Goldbergers declining influence (almost perfectly timed with Kimmelmans rise) and eventual deposition. As sensitive as he was to the sea changes in architecture (he sees the critic as social advocate), for many, he still represents the old. His reputation has been set as the Architecture Critic par excellence which in todays world is a bad bad thing.I would hazard a guess that Remnick will follow in The Times footsteps and hire a Kimmelman-eque