Michael Kimmelman Is On Fire!

Since he became the Times' newest architecture critic last fall, Michael Kimmelman has written a string of fantastic columns on affordable housing's design, housing policy, bike lanes and urban transportation, and parking lots. They're a poignant, articulate rebuke of the work of his predecessor, Nicolai Ouroussoff, who, as good a critic as he is, followed the traditional template of reviewing signature buildings by world-famous "starchitects" and traveled to the Middle East to observe postmodern oil urbanism. After the last decade's hollow excess, Kimmelman has returned design to the public realm, exploring the architecture of the everyday rather than that of luxury condos, Class A office buildings and art museums, and cajoling it to have a greater purpose than branding.

Kimmelman hit his peak last week with this one on the 200th anniversary of Manhattan's street grid, now the subject of an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. As much as I've tired of New York, one could never write so eloquently about Boston's streets. Boston holds plenty of poetry, but not of this sort. They simply don't hold the same magic. The column skips from one excellent point to the next, about the importance of government in tackling major questions of economic development and infrastructure; the public's role in creating private wealth; the power of simple design inventions; and the democratic and welcoming spirit of the grid's shape.

There's little I can add, but here are two observations: First, it's humorous to know that 19th-century New York's private landowners opposed the creation of the grid, only to see it make them fabulously wealthy, just as the property owners in late 20th-century Times Square opposed the regulation that would allows gigantic garish signs on their buildings, only to see it make them fabulously wealthy as the signs gave the Square its new identity. Second, the design of streets matter: A grid creates a very different mix of building envelopes, demographics and urbanism than those of cul-de-sacs specifically because it's a grid of connecting linear streets rather than a network of looped small streets, many of them dead ends. One of the two opens options and the other closes them.

Don't sleep on these columns.