Michael Kimmelman  Michael Kimmelman (born May 8, 1958) is an American author, critic, columnist and pianist. He is the architecture critic for "The New York Times" and has written about public housing, public space, landscape architecture, community development and equity, infrastructure and urban design. He has reported from more than 40 countries and twice been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, most recently in 2018 for his series on climate change and global cities. In March, 2014, he was awarded the Brendan Gill Prize for his "insightful candor and continuous scrutiny of New York's architectural environment" that is "journalism at its finest." Kimmelman was born and raised in Greenwich Village, the son of a physician and a sculptor, both civil rights activists. He attended PS 41 and Friends Seminary in Manhattan, graduated "summa cum laude" from Yale College with the Alice Derby Lang prize in classics and a degree in history, and received his graduate degree in art history from Harvard University, where he was an Arthur Kingsley Porter Fellow. He was the "New York Times"' longtime chief art critic – "the most acute American art critic of his generation" in the words of the Australian writer Robert Hughes. In 2007, Kimmelman created the Abroad column, as a foreign correspondent covering culture, political and social affairs across Europe and elsewhere. He returned to New York from Europe in autumn 2011 as the paper's senior critic and architecture critic, and his articles since then, on Hudson Yards, Penn Station, sound, climate change, the New York Public Library, the World Trade Center, transit and infrastructure, redevelopment after Hurricane Sandy, as well as on Syrian refugee camps as do-it-yourself cities, cultural identity in Baghdad and public space and protest in Turkey, Rio and post-revolutionary Cairo, among other issues at home and overseas, have helped to reshape policy and the public debate about urbanism, architecture and architectural criticism. "ArchDaily" called his 2015 review of the new Whitney Museum "the most important article in recent architectural memory." For that review and other work he won the Punch Sulzberger award from the American Society of News Editors in 2016. The magazine "New York" titled an article about him "The People's Critic". A pianist (a former student of Seymour Bernstein) who still performs as a soloist and with chamber groups on concert series in New York and around Europe, he was an editor at the magazine "I.D." and architecture critic for "New England Monthly".