NRO Weekend, October 28-29, 2000
A Critic’s Glass House
The erring ways of Herbert Muschamp.

By Catesby Leigh, an art and architecture critic, who has written for The Weekly Standard, the American Enterprise, and Touchstone

…It was early evening and starting to rain. I took a break to look out the window and saw a woman standing alone outside a bar across the street. She was wearing a long, white dress with matching white pumps, and she carried a pearlescent handbag. Was her date late? Had he stood her up? When I looked back a bit later, she was gone. And I asked myself, Why can't a building catch a moment like that? Then I realized that the reason I'd had that thought was that I'd just come from such a building. And the building I'd just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.

his curious epiphany was relayed a few years ago by the architecture critic of the New York Times, Herbert Muschamp, in a panegyric on the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. The Bilbao Guggenheim's exterior consists largely of contorted, titanium-sheathed volumes, with glass-curtain walls stashed crazily in the interstices.

The metallic eruption reaches its greatest height over the atrium, enclosing a skylight that pops out at the summit. Inside the atrium, the museum's main interior space, the architectural clutter curves, folds, and wiggles. Designed by Frank Gehry, the building is a parody of modernist expressionism. Too bad the parody is unintended.

As the most celebrated modernist architect around, Gehry, 71 years old and based in Los Angeles, twinkles brightly in that constellation of creative types that Marc Fumaroli, the distinguished French scholar, has dubbed the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Of course there's nothing new in the Times going to bat for that grand old party in its arts coverage, and Gehry certainly hasn't suffered from Muschamp's fervent advocacy of his work. Nevertheless, Muschamp radically altered the quality of the paper's architecture criticism during the '90s. His predecessor, Paul Goldberger, who is now at The New Yorker, subscribes to many of the same fallacies as Muschamp, but he is blessed with an engaging literary style. My (admittedly anecdotal) impression is that lay people actually read him. Muschamp's articles, on the other hand, are long, strange oracles fathomable to few outside the rarefied "architectural circles" he speaks for.

And yet the Times has given Muschamp great latitude, allowing him to indulge, in the past year, in rambling discourses on Donald Trump and the movie Gladiator. Why? Perhaps because Muschamp is less a student of architectural aesthetics than a social psychologist manqué, and his editors are intrigued by his divinations of the cultural moment. Such divinations have led Muschamp to lavish praise on the most idiosyncratic and anti-humanistic tendencies in architecture. His criticism nevertheless reveals much about the sorry state of the modernist experiment.

How can architecture's imaginative horizons have narrowed to the point where Muschamp merely wants a building to "catch a moment" in an original way, thus reflecting its designer's "construction of self"? The short answer is that this is the result of the failure of the modernist ideal during the 20th century.

That ideal called for the generation of a new set of architectural norms, which, like the supposedly obsolete Orders — the several types of classical columns and the entablatures they support — would be universally valid. These norms entailed the rationalization of architectural production in much the same sense that the machine had rationalized manufacturing. Along with the mechanistic paradigm came the distillation of "pure" abstract form and the jettisoning of the anthropomorphic and decorative aspects of traditional design that are so deeply rooted in human instinct.

True, a sense of proportion was retained by modernist pioneers like Mies van der Rohe, who designed the relentlessly rectilinear steel-and-glass Seagram Building on Park Avenue in the '50s. What's more, the International Style with which Mies's name is associated was by no means wholly formalist in its inspiration. Architects and critics alike justified the style on sociological as well as artistic grounds: Its hyper-rationalized geometries were hailed as the idealized expression of the industrial age, as symbols of the prospect of man's redemption by science and social policy. Even so, the most influential modernist architect of all, Le Corbusier, forsook this reductionist straitjacket for an architecture conceived in equally abstract, but far more sculptural, expressionistic terms.

By the time of Le Corbusier's death in 1965, however, the whole idea of a "heroic" modernism that would lead urban planning as well as architecture into a brave new world was losing traction. One formidable blow was the appearance, in 1961, of Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities. In portraying urban renewal as a pseudoscientific fiasco that was ruining vast tracts of America's cities and making life much worse for the poor, Jacobs duly noted the renewers' debt to the dreadful Radiant City scheme Le Corbusier had hatched for Paris during the '20s.

Modernism's specifically architectural pretensions were punctured a few years later with the publication of Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Venturi's anti-heroic post-modern idea was to resort once again to historical motifs in order to engage the public, which never cared for modernism, while manipulating these motifs in order to convey "meaning" to the usual suspects — architects, art historians, and critics.

Unfortunately, Venturi's famous rephrasing of Mies's "Less is more" aphorism as "Less is a bore" did not signify a return to classical forms; instead it nurtured a bumper crop of mediocre buildings whose historical references are half-baked rather than meaningful. Examples range from Philip Johnson's Sony Building (formerly AT&T's corporate headquarters) in midtown Manhattan, with its famous "Chippendale" pediment, to countless Art Deco rehash jobs.

The Institutional Revolutionaries, moreover, could never be fully reconciled to an anti-heroic conception of design. They are still infatuated with the romantic cult of the Creative Artist. What the grand old party needed, then, was a new paladin. It found one in Frank Gehry.

In contrast to the modernism of an earlier day, Gehry's work revolves around the quest for novelty rather than norms. He has designed cultural facilities — the building which very briefly housed the American Center in Paris, the Weisman Museum in Minneapolis — resembling three-dimensional regurgitations of Cubist paintings by Leger. He likes glitzy metal finishes, drooping towers, biomorphic forms resembling fish and other creatures, and architectural contours evocative of folded, rumpled, or billowing fabric.

In pushing the envelope of idiosyncratic sculptural expressionism, Gehry has relied over the past decade on computer software developed for aeronautical design. The Bilbao museum and other schemes involving the discombobulated arrangement of metallic forms are the result. Such designs do not resolve into distinct figural wholes, however, and this presents a problem. Gehry's recent projects for yet another Guggenheim alongside the East River in Lower Manhattan and a major addition to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., already look like the same old, same old.

It's impossible to justify the cultivation of disorder by Gehry and other late modernists on esthetic grounds, but that's hardly a problem for Muschamp. Whether he's defending the stark, weird forms of a new high school in Diamond Bar, California, or a proposal for an obviously inappropriate glass entrance pavilion for McKim, Mead, and White's Brooklyn Museum, one can rely on Muschamp to resort to dialectical smoke-and-mirrors in reaching conclusions far removed from the evidence of the senses.

What else can be expected of a critic who has defined architects as "Freudian figures in a Marxian landscape"? What else can be expected of a critic who advocates "idiosyncratic forms, atmospheric lighting, novel arrangements of furniture, vertiginous elevations, stairs and sloping floors that extend the street and grounds inside," declaring that "such devices are as much psychological as esthetic provocations"? No doubt the fact has escaped Muschamp's attention, but he is simply recycling the Institutional Revolutionaries' tired old épater le bourgeois publicity ruse. And like the architecture he promotes, his writing tends to degenerate into self-parody.

What of the modernist myth of social redemption? It goes almost without saying that today's Institutional Revolutionaries are terribly nostalgic about it, and Muschamp is no exception. He enjoys bestowing the laudatory term "democratic" upon Institutional Revolutionary projects to which it is every bit as inapplicable as "beauty," a word he also tosses out on occasion.

Back in 1994, Muschamp announced: "It does not require a great mental stretch to admire Frank Gehry's buildings and to feel compassion for the homeless at the same time." Touching. Muschamp went on to note that a kindred spirit on the Left Coast, social critic Mike Davis, "gets the point better than most when he writes that Gehry's work 'clarifies the underlying relations of repression, surveillance, and exclusion that characterize the fragmented, paranoid spatiality toward which Los Angeles seems to aspire.'" Muschamp clearly revels in the notion of contemporary design as social commentary, no matter how obscure or ephemeral its significance.

The grand old myth resurfaced earlier this year in Muschamp's eulogy for urban-renewal czar Edward Logue. Muschamp declared the failure of the renewers' infamous Radiant City-style public-housing towers to be "due more to lack of maintenance than architectural design." Wrong. As Jane Jacobs wrote in 1961, "The corridors of the usual high-rise, low-income housing building are like corridors in a bad dream: creepily lit, narrow, smelly, blind. They feel like traps, and they are. So are the elevators that lead to them." Architectural design created those traps. And in associating the towers with "the ideal of social equality," Muschamp is beating a horse that's been dead a long, long time.

A month after the Logue eulogy appeared, the Times's real-estate section carried an interesting story about the demolition of five largely abandoned public-housing high-rises in Baltimore and their replacement with over 300 traditional rowhouses with porches, most of which will be occupied by low-income tenants. This reliance on traditional streetscapes is called the New Urbanism, and Muschamp loathes it.

The fact remains, however, that the New Urbanism draws life from a humanist tradition in civic art, along with an essentially classical idealism. And in stark contrast to the "architectural circles" for which Muschamp speaks, the New Urbanists are having more impact on the broad scale than any architects have had since the urban-renewal debacle.