Herbert Muschamp

The first time I read this book was when I found it at a public library during the summer between my first and second years of college. It was probably the unique design of the book — cardboard cover, brown pages with Courier type, and yellow tape on the spine — that drew me to it, as I had not heard of Muschamp at the time. This was the same year, 1992, that Muschamp was appointed the architecture critic of the New York Times, a post he would hold until 2004. But this book, his first, was published almost 20 years before I grabbed it off the shelf at the library. Muschamp's writing would become more accessible over the years than this at-times-dense book, but his hyperbolic, flowery and often contradictory style of writing is apparent in what could be described as an architecture critic's version of free-form jazz. But Muschamp calls himself an architect ("who has neither designed nor built any buildings nor has the inclination to do so") rather than a critic, and he summarizes the book as "architecture in the image of a maze to give myself practice in the art of escaping mazes." Yep, sounds like the Muschamp we grew to love — and hate just as often — at the New York Times all those decades later.… (mehr)