Texts with Mark Lamster

Mark Lamster, maybe the most deeply dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker I know, born at University Hospital (now NYU Langone) in Manhattan in 1969, a man who wears a Yankee cap while leading tours of the Kennedy assassination site in Dealey Plaza, and who told me without hesitation that watching the Knicks win the most recent NBA title made him happier than (as had happened just weeks earlier) winning the Pulitzer Prize, moved to Texas in 2013 to become the architecture critic at the Dallas Morning News. If any locals saw him at first as an outsider, he won them over in fairly short order by, among other gestures of commitment, becoming unimpeachably versed in the city’s—and the state’s—architectural, political, and urban history. (I’ll let him tell you the story of his reaction when a tenured Ivy League architectural historian confessed she’d never heard of O’Neil Ford.) When it came time, last year, for local writers to defend I.M. Pei’s Dallas City Hall building as it faced the threat of demolition, nobody in Dallas was surprised that Lamster was the one who most compellingly took up the charge. (The heart of his Pulitzer package was a series of columns on the fate of Pei’s 1978 Brutalist landmark.) In August, Lamster released his third book on architecture, “Welcome to Paradox City: A Critical History of Dallas as Told Through Its Architecture” (Deep Vellum Publishing). Breaking from our usual group-chat subject matter, which tends to start and end with basketball, travel, food, middle age, our kids, our dogs, and griping about other architecture critics (shhh!), we traded messages this week about his new book. Lamster will be appearing on Tuesday evening, Oct. 6, at the New Canaan Library, for a reading that is part of the Glass House Presents series. I hope to see some of you there!