The first in a year-long series of virtual lectures, beginning with this conversation with New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, and journalist Roberta Brandes Gratz. In a one-hour virtual discussion, with audience Q&A, they explore the outlook for cities post-pandemic.
Michael Kimmelman has been The New York Times’s architecture critic since 2011. His work focuses on urban affairs, public space, housing for the poor, infrastructure, social equality and the environment, as well as on design. A best-selling author, he has won numerous awards over the years and been praised for his insight, candor and “continuous scrutiny of New York’s architectural environment.”
From 2007 to 2011, Mr. Kimmelman was based in Berlin, covering Europe and the Middle East. He has reported from more than 40 countries and twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. While based in Berlin he reported on life under Hamas in Gaza, the crackdown on culture in Putin’s Russia, negritude in France and bullfighting in Spain, among other subjects. He was previously The Times’s longtime chief art critic.
He is a graduate of Yale and Harvard, adjunct professor at Columbia University, former Franke fellow at the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale, and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Roberta Brandes Gratz is an award-winning journalist and urban critic, international lecturer and author. Her most recent book is It’s a Helluva Town: Joan Kaplan Davidson and the J.M. Kaplan Fund and the Fight for a Better New York. Voted one of Planetizen’s top 100 urban thinkers in 2011, she is also the author of five other books on urban change.
Ms. Gratz is widely credited for coining the term “Urban Husbandry” and illustrating in her writing how urban regeneration works in actuality, rather than just in theory.
She served from 2003 to 2010 on the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, leaving for an appointment to the Mayor’s Sustainability Advisory Committee.
In 2005, in collaboration with Jane Jacobs, Stephen Goldsmith and Margie Zeidler, Ms. Gratz founded the Center for the Living City to build on Ms. Jacobs’ work. This was the culmination of several years of discussion with Ms. Jacobs about building on her legacy.
