When Herbert Muschamp died on October 2, at the age of 59, it was as though a planet dropped out of our architectural constellation. From his first book in 1974, File Under Architecture, he was a fixture in our sky of thought—and then, suddenly, after a surprisingly short bout with lung cancer, he was no longer there. Whether you loved or hated his musings, you never put his articles in a pile for tomorrow. The pieces were like Herbert himself: penetrating, maddening, insightful, delightful, capricious—sometimes in the same paragraph. He practiced unpredictability as a tool of intellectual provocation.
His great achievement as a writer was to put the “I” into criticism, revealing from the outset his character and the filter through which he saw. He avoided donning the mask of objectivity, instead practicing full disclosure, inviting the reader into a near stream of consciousness that offered a ride of hairpin turns. He kept his readers company and if you liked the company, you liked the piece. Some did not.
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