Mark Lamster's very first assignment for The Dallas Morning News was a bombshell. His review of the George W. Bush Presidential Center appeared on the front page of the paper in April of last year, days before the library opened to the public. It didn't pull any punches. "Everywhere competent, it nowhere rises to a level of inspiration," Lamster wrote. The newspaper's newly minted architecture critic called out the project's host, Southern Methodist University President R. Gerald Turner, for a directive that "precluded a work of more adventurous design."

"It was very embarrassing to a lot of what I'd call boosters in town," says Bob Mong, the editor-in-chief of The Dallas Morning News, who brought Lamster down from New York. Mong nevertheless put it smack dab on A1. "It got everyone's attention, let me tell you. When you stand back from it and look at what he wrote, it holds up very well today."

Readers greeted Lamster cautiously. "Must be a Democrat," said one commenter. "The review was written before the yankee [sic] got there," chimed another. That's to be expected: If you'd asked people on the street which public figure they would've liked to see lured to Dallas, plenty would've said Johnny Manziel.

But while Johnny Football would've ruined one of Dallas's greatest institutions, Lamster is elevating the city through his reporting and criticism. "Welcome to Dallas: Paradox City," a September report on the conflicting interests driving development there, could double as a mission statement for his work as a critic. Earlier this month, he explained the function and history of a complex of jails that he describes as the "unholy gateway to our city." That report segues neatly into "Building the Just City," the title for the third annual David Dillon Symposium, a conference he is helping to host today and Saturday for the University of Texas at Arlington School of Architecture.

More and more, the decision to bring Lamster to Dallas looks like a prudent investment. Yet it's not a move that the newspaper could necessarily afford to make alone. The Dallas Morning News brought Lamster from New York to the Big D through a joint appointment with the University of Texas at Arlington—where he also teaches.

It's an unusual arrangement for an architecture critic, but then again, so is Dallas. For a number of reasons, Lamster's work could serve as a model for places like Dallas: paradox cities where the need for criticism is plain, but the means for underwriting it are nearly nonexistent.