In the Spirit of Ada Louise Huxtable, a Times Critic Reinvents His Role

Michael Kimmelman’s piece on Ada Louise Huxtable, who died this week at age 91, in Tuesday’s Arts section is tagged “An Appraisal,” but it could easily have been called something more enthusiastic: an appreciation. For by his own eager admission, Mr. Kimmelman - who took over as architecture critic in September 2011 â€" owes much to Ms. Huxtable, whom he calls a role model.

If Ms. Huxtable invented the role of newspaper architecture critic in the 1960s and 1970s, then Mr. Kimmelman has spent the last year or so inventing it anew - with more than a nod to the woman whose work he grew up reading and admiring.

“She’s been a role model and an inspiration,” Mr. Kimmelman told me Tuesday. “I exist in her shadow as somebody who aspires to see both the art and the social and political role of the built environment, and to treat this job as a bully pulpit for making better places to live.”

Unlike many of the other culture critics at The Times, the architecture critic has considerable freedom to choose his own assignments and areas of interest - not bound, as others are, by the equivalent of the blockbuster movie, the big Broadway premiere, or the major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The role is “an outlier among the critics,” he said.

In his first 16 months on the job, Mr. Kimmelman, by design, has taken on architecture (broadly defined) in all of New York City’s five boroughs, as well as farther afield - going to Medellín, Colombia, to write about urban planning, to Louisville, Ky., to write about highways, and to Oakland, Calif., to write about housing projects.

Rather than lavishing attention on the world of “starchitects” and what he calls “buildings as baubles,” he has defined his role more broadly: writing, for example, about the importance of place to the Occupy Wall Street movement, and about the implications of Hurricane Sandy.

“Why is it intrinsically more interesting to write about a museum wing instead of a library or a hospital” he asked.

He has also shown himself more than willing to take a big swing at a fat pitch, as he did in his Christmas Eve takedown of the new Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. (The piece qualifies as one of those “all guns blazing” reviews I wrote about in a recent Sunday column.) It begins:

Offhand I can’t recall seeing a more ridiculous looking building than the new Stedelijk Museum, which recently opened here. Shaped like a bathtub, of all things, it arrives years behind schedule at the tail end of the money-fueled, headline-hungry, erratically ingenious era of indulgent museum design that began to peter out with the global economy.

Later: “Entering an oversize plumbing fixture to commune with classic modern art is like hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit.”

Like Ms. Huxtable, Mr. Kimmelman is attuned to “the democracy of this art form.” In that context, he told me that he admired her “ability to speak truth to power” and to express - and stand by - an unpopular point of view as she did when she wrote approvingly of Boston’s new and widely deplored city hall in 1969.

“Maybe that came partly from being a woman, having a distance from the traditional seats of power,” he said, calling her “incorruptible.”

In his appraisal, Mr. Kimmelman wrote that Ms. Huxtable “had that rare journalistic opportunity to pioneer something of her own, to fill a yawning gap in the public discourse, to carve a path with moral dimensions…”

It’s heartening to see him honor his role model by bringing that same mission into The Times again, reinvented for the 21st century.