On Herbert Muschamp
4 October 2007 | Share:
A former Philadelphian died Tuesday and it’s worth taking a moment to think about his legacy. Herbert Muschamp was the architecture critic of the New York Times from 1992 to 2004, when some say he was forced out for writing too much about meaning and not enough about form. No one could understand what he was saying. Whether that was true or not, what is certain is that Muschamp championed the urbanism of movement, expression, and change — and had no time for regression, detachment, and formula.
There are Philadelphia architects who got caught in his claws and they like others in New York quickly built a disdain for him. But not me. My wife Rona and I would read his columns aloud to each other (as we did his obituary this morning), surprised and excited that someone with such a pulpit should “get it.” What Muschamp got, I believe, was an essential understanding of the power of the city to take a role in both an individual’s life and in the cultural dialog. The city ought to answer back, and when it stops doing so — when architects remove themselves from the urban conversation — it loses power and relevance in our lives.
Muschamp’s replacement, Nicolai Ouroussoff, ends his obituary this morning with this quote from the late critic:
We were the children of white flight, the first generation to grow up in postwar American suburbs. By the time the 60s rolled around, many of us, the gay ones especially, were eager to make a U-turn and fly back the other way. Whether or not the city was obsolete, we couldn’t imagine our personal futures in any other form. The street and the skyline signified to us what the lawn and the highway signified to our parents: a place to breathe free.
It strikes me that the city signifies just this to so many of us, freedom to conceive of the American life in a different way, and to live it too.
Here is Muschamp’s critique of the Kimmel Center: NYTimes.com.