My first piece of architectural criticism was written for Hilton Kramer, at his request, when he edited Arts Digest in the 1950s. It was a review of the Manufacturers’ Hanover Bank at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Third Street, a small jewel of modernism, now a designated but much altered New York City landmark dispensing trendy clothing instead of cash. Hilton would have hated what has happened to it; he would have thoroughly understood the kind of aesthetic blindness and pious hypocrisy responsible for its present compromised state, and he would have expressed his opinion in no uncertain terms with precisely phrased, brutally direct, well-chosen words. I loved him for that kind of straight thinking and straight talk, still do, and always will.

By asking me for that piece, Hilton is responsible for starting my career. By believing, with me, that architecture was an art when buildings in New York were viewed only as negotiable real estate, he gave me the confidence and support that I needed to attempt something that had not been done before—writing about architecture in terms of the social and aesthetic values that profoundly shape our cities and our lives.

Our paths crossed again in the 1970s, when I was the architecture critic of The New York Timesand he was its chief art critic. We worked together for almost a decade and he continued to be my unfailing, outspoken champion against the occasional misguided efforts of some uncomprehending editor and the inevitable protests from