Kimmelman's remarks, in conversation with Dean Jonathan Massey, are followed by a public interview with Taubman College's Agora and Dimensions publications, exploring the role of journalists in issues of racial justice, social equity, health, and climate change in the context of the built environment.
Since he returned to New York from Europe in the fall of 2011, Michael Kimmelman has been the architecture critic of The New York Times. He has reported from more than 40 countries and twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 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. The magazine New York titled an article about him “The People’s Critic.” In March 2014, Mr. Kimmelman was given the Brendan Gill Prize for “insightful candor and continuous scrutiny of New York’s architectural environment,” “that is journalism at its finest."
From 2007 to 2011, Mr. Kimmelman was based in Berlin, covering Europe and the Middle East, having devised the “Abroad” column. While there, 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 - “the most acute American art critic of his generation,” according to the late Australian writer Robert Hughes.
A graduate of Yale and Harvard, adjunct professor at Columbia University and former Franke fellow at the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale, he has contributed regularly to The New York Review of Books.
The Raoul Wallenberg Lecture was initiated in 1971 by Sol King, a former classmate of Wallenberg's. An endowment was established in 1976 for an annual lecture to be offered in Raoul's honor on the theme of architecture as a humane social art.