Book Review - 'Hearts of the City - The Selected Writings of Herbert Muschamp' - Review - NYTimes.com In the summer of 2008, three men scaled the New York Times Building, pulling themselves up by its ladderlike ceramic rods. Herbert Muschamp didn't live long enough to witness those acts of daredevilry, but he would have appreciated the way the climbers literally came to grips with architecture. He might have seen them as action critics like himself, using the paper's resources to broadcast an anarchic interpretation of what a building is for. Ezra Stoller/Esto Edward Durell Stone's 2 Columbus Circle, before its remaking. The Selected Writings of Herbert Muschamp By 887 pp. Muschamp served as The Times's architecture critic and later a design columnist from 1992 until his death in 2007, and he treated his profession as high adventure. "Hearts of the City," a posthumous collection of 20 years" worth of columns published in The New Republic, Artforum and (mostly) The Times, finds him charging into reviews, tossing flares of prose and urging readers to see buildings as metaphors for society's self-image. He hunts down significance in some unlikely places - the Mohegan Sun casino, for example, where a circle of fake trees "recalls architecture's primitive roots" and the whole resort acts as "a symbol of American life in the post-cold-war era." The effort to eke relevance out of concrete and steel sometimes leaves him dizzy. You can sense him flipping madly through his ample library of cultural references, unable to select just one. In a review of Richard Meier's pair of white-and-clear apartment buildings on Perry Street, he indulges in giddy anthropomorphizing, merging structure and inhabitant in his eagerness to capture the exhibitionistic glamour of both: It strikes me that the towers are a pair of Hitchcock blondes. The white metal framework of their facades is so crisp and pure that the towers could be two twins dressed for First Communion. But inside, fireworks: two towers full of racy Rear Windows. I do believe that's Miss Torso up there, practicing jazz dance right now. Soon to be joined by Nicole Kidman, Calvin Klein, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and I forget the rest. How will they handle window treatments? The world anxiously awaits. Muschamp's eccentricities are stimulating and infuriating in equal measure. A tiny cohort of expressive designers (Gehry, Koolhaas, Hadid and company) monopolizes his attention. He barely feigns interest in mundane issues of functionality, and has little to say about how a new building stitches itself into a neighborhood. Passion is all. He reverently cites the 19th-century critic Walter Pater, who observed that the critic's essential equipment is "the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects." He also quotes Andy Warhol: "Pop Art is liking things." Together, these two aphorisms serve as the goal posts of Muschamp's philosophy: This work moves me, ergo it must mean something vast. Guiding himself by his visceral responses allows Muschamp to embrace the vulgar and the sublime with equal gusto. He has a soft spot for garishness - for Donald Trump, for the blaringly hip Hudson Hotel and for the loud-tie designs of the Miami-based firm Arquitectonica. "Look up, people," he exhorts. This is New York. We live in one great ugly town. Not being too hung up on beauty is what makes life here possible, even thrilling. He enjoys buildings that behave inappropriately, especially when they're frank about the link between architecture and libido. He likes a sexy structure. But enthusiasm can be treacherous, even to the enthusiast. He plunges into idea after idea, hacking at conventional pieties and impaling historical fallacies, only to lose himself in a thicket of disjointed observations. Once the ring of self-­evident brilliance has faded from each opening sentence, it's replaced by a low hum of confusion. He has something urgent to communicate, though what, exactly, isn't always clear. At times, he tries to bolster his subjective reactions by pushing erudition to the point of nonsense. He writes of Donald Trump: "For some years now, I've been playing Ascyltos to his Trimalchio, two characters in Petronius's "Satyricon," the most celebrated fictional depiction of life in Nero's Rome. According to Tacitus, Petronius was called arbiter elegantiae because the emperor consulted him on all matters of taste. On his roundabout way back to his topic, Muschamp pauses long enough to toss out a scholarly concept - "taste cultures" - that rings through his prose. Muschamp always felt strongly about Edward Durell Stone's Gallery of Modern Art at Columbus Circle, and he hated to see Brad Cloepfil remake it into the Museum of Arts and Design. But just why he had such strong emotions didn't come clear until 2006, when he eulogized Stone's doomed design as a temple to what he called "The Greatest Gay Generation." For some critics, Stone's travertine folly was an offense to modernist restraint. For him, it was the epicenter of a gay sensibility - a "taste culture" - that helped to form him and at the same time, he says, saved New York from anti-urban prejudice and neglect. I have read Muschamp's epic, erotic essay, demurely titled "The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle," half a dozen times, and on each occasion awe and frustration rearrange themselves in different proportions. I admire the way he endows a dubious design achievement with the richness of experience. One way to judge architecture is by the stories told about it. Those who use a building are the ones who make it matter. This is a profound but straightforward argument, and I wish he had made it more straightforwardly. But Muschamp's favorite literary genre is the digression. Each time I return to the article, sooner or later I get to a point where I stop having any idea what he's talking about. On my last attempt, the moment of mystification came here: "A Nietzschean might describe this libidinous urban outburst as an example of the Eternal Return. Nietzsche never ruled out lollipops as a form this phenomenon might take. But it would take many other shapes before long. I recognize shadows of sense: Ada Louise Huxtable's famous dismissal of 2 Columbus Circle as "a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops" and the profoundly depressing concept that everything in the universe is bound to recur - that we are all trapped in a cosmic "Groundhog Day." But what, exactly, ties these two notions together? Instead of explaining, Muschamp moves on to another fusillade of references: Robert Venturi, John Ruskin, Rem Koolhaas, and so on. He doesn't drop names so much as spray them onto the page. Over and over again, his columns lead the reader on the same trajectory from "Aha!" to "Huh?" And the compilers of this collection have done him no favors by including fragments of the book he was writing toward the end of his life, a meandering essay-cum-memoir that never got beyond an early draft. Yet his ramblings have value as a reproach to journalism's culture of verbal thrift. Most of us who live from deadline to deadline learn to scrimp on column inches and discard unnecessary words before they have a chance to draw an editor's economical eye. The successful sentence glides across the page and fits into the next one with an undetectable click. Muschamp, on the other hand, was a voluptuary of language, prodigal with words and nonchalant about non sequiturs. He occupied a major pulpit, but he delivered his homilies in a grandly, splashily non­institutional style. In New York's developer-­driven world of compliant architecture, Muschamp's columns offered a countercultural frisson, a streak of fuchsia in a gray coiffure. Justin Davidson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2002, is the classical music and architecture critic for New York magazine.