The only time I met Herbert Muschamp, four years ago when we were both in Cincinnati to get an early look at Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center, he was in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He had unkempt wavy black hair and scuffed boots and reached out a hand towards me from inside his cloud in a way that was half friendly, half antsy. I told him that I was pleased to meet him, though I wasn’t sure I was, and that I admired his work, which I did.
I’m sorry I didn’t tell him how much. Muschamp, who was for 12 years the architecture critic of The New York Times, died Tuesday at 59 of lung cancer. Every so often The Times gets a critic who colors outside the lines, one who’s not just smart but quirky in all the right ways. John Leonard, who wrote for them mostly about books in the 1970s, was one. Richard Eder on books, plays and films was another. The film reviewer Elvis Mitchell could be another one. And Manohla Dargis, currently another of their film critics, is another.
But Muschamp was the gold standard. To put it mildly, he could overstate. I still shake my head at his comparison of Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall with the famous headshot of Judy Garland fanning her fingers out from either side of her face. And he could befuddle. I’m still revisiting his piece on Walter Benjamin’s unfinished essay on the Arcades of Paris, and still not sure of everything he was getting at. But he had that indispensable combination of range, taste, knowledge, enthusiasm and style that made you eager to read him. He was intellectually penetrating — he read buildings very skillfully. Above all he was passionate. When he came to The Times in 1992, from The New Republic, he believed fiercely that New York, and the U.S., were not getting the buildings they deserved. He set out to do something about it and he did. And there was a hyper ventilating lyricism to his writing that could make you laugh out loud.
Something was lost the day three years ago that he left that job. And two days ago it was lost for good. But Muschamp’s work met that difficult standard for newspaper writing. It was collectible. I know that everything is archived now in cyberspace. But the things we value most we still put between covers. His work belongs there and I hope somebody sees to it soon that it gets there.