Herbert Muschamp

Herbert Muschamp
Born	Herbert Mitchell Muschamp November 28, 1947 Philadelphia
Died	October 3, 2007 New York City
Education	University of Pennsylvania, Parsons School of Design
Occupation	architecture critic
Notable credit(s)	The New York Times, The New Republic, Vogue, House and Garden and Art Forum

Herbert Mitchell Muschamp (November 28 1947 – October 3 2007) was a prominent American architecture critic.

Born in Philadelphia, Muschamp attended the University of Pennsylvania but dropped out after two years to move to New York City, where he was a regular at Andy Warhol's Factory. He later attended Parsons School of Design, where he studied architecture, and returned to teach after spending some time studying in London.

During this period, he began writing architectural criticism for various magazines, including Vogue, House and Garden, and Art Forum. He was appointed the architecture critic for The New Republic in 1987.

Muschamp became the architecture critic for the The New York Times in 1992, succeeding Paul Goldberger. During his controversial tenure at the Times, Muschamp rose, according to Nicolai Ouroussoff, to preeminence as the nation's foremost judge of the architecture world. His writing championed now-famous architects such as Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel, as well as architects that he regarded as rising talents, including Greg Lynn, Lindy Roy, Jesse Reiser, Nanako Umemoto and Casagrande & Rintala.

His detractors, noted the New York Observer, argued that his conflicts of interest, from socializing with his subjects frequently, and his "iconoclasm and obscurantism, his unapologetic dilettantism" were along with his "very public break downs" a source of a "fall from grace."

Muschamp was a lover of cities. One of his most often quoted lines came from a 2004 review: "A city is never more fully human than when expertise – our own or someone else's – allows us access to ebullience, lightness and delight." He spent a number of columns criticizing the new master plan for the World Trade Center site, calling the plan produced by Daniel Libeskind an embodiment of the "Orwellian condition America's detractors accuse us of embracing: perpetual war for perpetual peace."

He stepped down as the architecture critic of the New York Times in 2004 to write the "Icons" column for the Times' T Style Magazine, among other features. He was replaced by his protégé, Ouroussoff. Openly gay, the centrality of gay men in the cultural life of New York City was central to Muschamp's writing. He continued to write until his death from lung cancer in Manhattan in 2007.