Hearts of the City The Selected Writings of Herbert Muschamp

by Muschamp, Herbert; Ouroussoff, Nicolai

• ISBN13: 9780375404061
• ISBN10: 0375404066
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-11-17
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

The best work of the late Herbert Muschamp, former architecture critic ofThe New York Times,and one of the most outspoken, lively, and influential voices in architectural criticism. Gathered here are pieces fromThe New Republic, The New York Times,andArtforum,as well as fragments of the book left unfinished. Muschamp drew on film, literature, and popular culture to write pieces that were passionate and personal, changing the landscape of architectural criticism in the process. He made it a subject accessible for everyone when, because of the heated debate between modernists and postmodernists, architecture had become part of a larger public dialogue. He reviewed architecture and design shows; he compared Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao to the body of Marilyn Monroe; he waxed poetic about a new design for Manhattan's manhole covers. Early on he championed the work of Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, and Santiago Calatrava, and was drawn to the theoretical writings of architects such as Peter Eisenman. Included is his brilliant and poignant six-thousand-word piece about gay culture and Edward Durrell Stone's museum at 2 Columbus Circle. Timely and often prescient,Hearts of the Cityis a dazzling collection of critical writing about the cityscapes that profoundly affect our lives.

Author Biography

Herbert Muschamp is the author of File Under Architecture and Man About Town: Frank Lloyd Wright in New York City. He died in 2007.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction by Nicolai Ouroussoff
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC, 1987–1992
The Temple of Marketing
Corbu Saved from Drowning
The Breached Wall
The Perils of Public Art
The Leaning Tower of Theory
The Lie of the Land
How Buildings Remember
The Winds of Windsorism
When the Cathedral Turned Black
American Gothic
The Wrong Prescription
East/West Side Story
Crowds and Power
 
ARTFORUM, 1995, 1999
Critical Reflections
Moral of the Stories
 
THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1992–2007
One Building That Knows What It’s About
For All the Star Power, a Mixed Performance
Steel and Backbone in Hard Times
Barcelona Breaks the Record for Inspired Urbanism
For Times Square, a Reprieve and Hope of a Livelier Day
The Thrill of Outer Space for Earthbound Lives
In Philadelphia, a Showcase of Abandoned Hopes
Reduced to Luxury
The Niña, the Pinta, and the Fate of the “White City”
Art and Science Politely Disagree on an Architectural Jewel’s Fate
For Staten Island, A Ferry Terminal Rooted in the Past
Gehry’s Disney Hall: A Matterhorn for Music
St. John the Divine: It Can’t Go On. It Goes On.
Thinking About Tomorrow, and How to Build It
The Tale of a Chimney That Turned into an Oasis
Some Unfinished Business on St.-Germain
Roadside Attractions to Reckon With
Modernism and Morality in the South Bronx
New Public Housing, French Vintage 1922
Shaping a Monument to Memory
This Time, Eisenman Goes Conventional
To the Beach: A Baedeker for Baskers; Long Beach Island
The Unconventional as a Convention
“Things Generally Wrong in the Universe”
In This Dream Station Future and Past Collide
Miami Virtue: Arquitectonica’s Low-Rent Housing
Viñoly’s Vision for Tokyo, and for the Identity of Japan
More Is Less at a Free-Form Jamboree in Chicago
A Nervous Prism of a Building for Manhattan
What Makes a Building Shrivel Up and Die?
The Gehry House: A Brash Landmark Grows Up
A Man Who Lives in Two Glass Houses
Fear, Hope, and the Changing of the Guard
Frank Gehry Lifts Creativity Out of the Box
The Homeless and the New Cold War
Rude Awakening; Quake Jars Assumptions: A Critic’s View
Architecture as Social Action, and Vice Versa
An Appraisal; Columbus Circle’s Changing Face: More than Geometry
Back to the Future
Queens West: Why Not Something Great?
In Paris, a Building That Melts Away Like Ice
Frank Gehry’s American (Center) in Paris
“Boss” Design: A Los Angeles Sketchbook
Radical Moderation, Right Out of the ’60s
If You Squint, This Is Not a Faulty Tower
In California, an Art Center Grown from Fragments
Visions of Community with Roots in the ’60s
A Show Brings on a Severe Case of Period Envy
Rem Koolhaas’s New York State of Mind
Stay of Execution for a Dazzling Airline Terminal
Sighting Beauty on the Far Side of Fear
The Moment When the World Seemed New
An Architect with a Knack for Synthesis
An Emporium for Art Rises in the West
Playful, Even Goofy, but What Else? It’s Disney
What of Cities If the Blueprint Is Republican?
Art, Setting, and the Architecture of the Heart
A Declaration of the ’60s, Before the Doubts
Preserving the Shrines of an Age, Not the Spirit
A Flare for Fantasy: Miami Vice Meets Forty-second Street
Where the Readers Are Inside the Books
Broadway’s Real Hits Are Its Antique Theaters
A “Monster” of a Masterpiece in Connecticut
Among the Fountains with Tadao Ando: Concrete Dreams in the Sun
    King’s Court
Remodeling New York for the Bourgeoisie
In a Bygone Day, This Was the Look of the Future
Getting Goofy on the Santa Ana Freeway
Chelsea Dawning: Reawakened and Resplendent
Buildings Born of Dreams and Demons
The Prisoner of Beauty
A City Poised on Glitter and Ashes
In the Public Interest
The Short, Scorned Life of an Aesthetic Heresy: Designed in Defiance of
     Modernist Tenets, 2 Columbus Circle Awaits Its Fate
Nostalgia Tripping in Times Square
In Japan, Art and a Museum Breathe as One
A Primal Phantasmagoria Not Just for Gamblers
Where a Room Is a Calling Card
Architecture of Light and Remembrance
Darling: Having a Surreal Time. Are You Here, Too?
A Crystal Palace of Culture and Commerce
Worthy of a World Capital
Rethinking the Meaning of the Modern
Form Follows Function into Ideal Circles
Making a Rush-Hour Battleground High Art
A Chance for an Architect to Let His Imagination Run Free
A Flower Reopens in the Bronx
Architects’ Visions of How the Modern May One Day Appear
A Palace for a New Magic Kingdom, Forty-second Street
Make the Modern Modern? How Very Rash!
The Designs of a Genius Redesigning Himself
For the Body, a Curvy Home That Calls to the Soul
Searching for Yourself in Versace’s Mirror
In Form and Function, It’s a Tale of Two Terminals
The Miracle in Bilbao
It’s Dark. It’s Scary. It’s Your Garage.
A Midas of the Gold (Yes, I Do Mean Gold) Cudgel
A Mountaintop Temple Where Art’s Future Worships Its Past
Leading Lights, Whose Destiny Was to Be Dimmed
Aalto, a Modernist Ahead of His Time
A Return to the Glamour of Flying: Kennedy’s New Terminal Offers Style
     and Comfort for Jaded Travelers
Of Sculpture and the Past Revivified
Looking at the Lawn, and Below the Surface
Choosing Prose over Poetry to Span a Bay
Restoration Liberates Grand Vistas, and Ideas
An Islamic Reminder of the Sacred in Design
Living Boldly on the Event Horizon
The Village as a Satirist’s Milieu and Muse
Blueprint: The Shock of the Familiar
A Twelve-Block Glimmer of Hope for New York
The Premiere of a Koolhaas Fantasy
The New Berlin—Building on the Rubble of History: Once Again, a City
     Rewards the Walker
Culture’s Power Houses: The Museum Becomes an Engine of Urban
     Redesign
New Zoning Leaves Room for Skyline of the Future
If the Cityscape Is Only a Dream
An Appreciation: Style and Symbolism Meet in Design for Penn Station
A Stunning Pier Hotel Design Stands Out Amid a Flawed Plan
A Humble Manhole Cover Conveys the Global Grid
A Tower That Flaunts Its Contradictions
Art Deco Authenticity
Trump, His Gilded Taste, and Me
Crystal Corridor in the City of Glass
The Passages of Paris and of Benjamin’s Mind
Exploring Space and Time, Here and Now
It’s Something New Under the Stars (and Looking Up)
Tray Chic
Our Anxieties to the Lions
Reaching for Power over Streets and Sky
Fusing Beauty and Terror, Reverence and Desecration
How Modern Design Remains Faithful to Its Context
Tibor Kalman: Seeing, Disbelieving
Public Space or Private, a Compulsion to Fill It
The Air-conditioned Reverie of a Fundamentalist
Interior City: Hotel as the New Cosmopolis
Where Ego Sashays in Style
A Rare Opportunity for Real Architecture Where It’s Needed
A Rational Vision That Lets You Know Who’s Boss
Lincoln Center’s Next Big Production: Itself
Defining Beauty in Swanky American Terms
Imaginative Leaps into the Real World
A Message from a Poet of Public and Private Memory
Camelot’s Once and Future Glamour
Postcards from the Old World Gone Global
Austro Turf
Forget the Shoes, Prada’s New Store Stocks Ideas
With Viewing Platforms, a Dignified Approach to Ground Zero
Leaping from One Void into Others
The Deadly Importance of Making Distinctions
A Courtyard at the Heart of the Story
A Lesson Abroad: Get Comfortable with Continuity
When Art Puts Down a Bet in a House of Games
A Gift of Vienna That Skips the Schlag
A Handsome Hunk of a Glass Tower
Lessons of a Humanist Who Can Disturb the Peace
Peace Lobby
A Latin Jolt to the Skyline
Castles in the Air Adorn Cities on Paper
Fashion’s High Priestess of Gnosticism
The Memorial Would Live in the Architecture
A Heritage Rediscovered, Then Remade
From Olympus, Divine Dresses
The Way We Live Now: 5-18-03; Who Gets It ?
Zaha Hadid’s Urban Mothership
Blond Ambition on Red Brick
A Building with a Song in Its Heart
A Moon Palace for the Hollywood Dream
Design Guidelines for Ground Zero Point More to Space City, U.S.A.
Lunch Box for Art: A New Museum
A Building’s Bold Spirit, Clad in Marble and Controversy
Uncertain Future for the Past’s Treasures
PATH Station Becomes a Procession of Flight
Glamorous Glass Gives 10 Columbus Circle a Look of Crystallized Noir
For Lower Manhattan, Tower Offers a Residential Stairway to the Sky
Planet Prada
The Library That Puts on Fishnets and Hits the Disco
For the Classy and the Climbers, the High Priest of Art Deco
Peep Show
Eden Rocks
The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle
The Grassi Is Greener
Schadenfreude.com
Freudian Slipcovers
The Heir Bag
 
Fragments from HEARTS OF THE CITY, 2006
A Dozen Years
Metroscope
Atomic Secrets
 
Index

Excerpts

This book presents a theory about the contemporary city. I arrived at this theory a few years ago by flipping around an idea proposed by D. W. Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst. Winnicott once observed that artists are people driven by the conflict between a desire to communicate and an even stronger desire to hide. My theory states: A great city is a place driven by the conflict between a desire to expose and an even stronger desire to overlook.

I start with the premise that conflict is the most important cultural product a city puts out. Works of art—books, plays, paintings, dances, songs, or buildings—are effects. They are interesting in themselves, of course, but so is the conflict that Winnicott considered their cause. The modern democratic city is an accumulation of effects, brought about by a constant pileup of conflicts. What binds the effects together—the First Cause of Cities—is the conflict between the desire to overlook and the desire to expose. This conflict is the major source of energy on which cultural production depends. It drives the contemporary city toward a deeper comprehension of its place and time. It is what distinguishes culturally productive social environments, like New York, from suburban shopping malls and other environments designed primarily for consumption.


M. P. Baumgartner, a sociologist who teaches at Rutgers University, coined the termmoral minimalismto describe the prevailing social ethos among suburbanites. The key feature of this ethos is the avoidance of conflict. InThe Morality of the Suburb, Baumgartner writes, “The most basic component of [moral minimalism] is a strong conviction that conflict is a social contaminant, something to be avoided if at all possible and to be ended quickly once begun.”

Barking dogs. Unmowed lawns. Barbecue smoke. Vandalism. Traffic infractions. Zoning violations. Gossip. Clearly, suburban dwellers can’t avoid neighbor squabbles and other conflicts. But within the suburban moral order, such conflicts register as bad things—contaminants, to use Baumgarten’s word. This order reinforces the desire to overlook, even at the expense of social justice or personal dignity. The desire to expose is suppressed. The inner conflict between these two competing desires is avoided.
In the city, this is not possible. The desire to expose is constantly breaking through, however much it threatens to disturb the peace.

I write about architecture, but buildings are not discrete objects floating in space. They are pieces of the city, elements of modern democracy’s greatest project. How they look, how tall they are, how much space they take up, who uses them, what is torn down to make room for them: by raising such questions, buildings are an inexhaustible source of conflict in city life. That conflict is one of the driving forces in American democracy. I’ve wanted to be part of it since I was ten years old.

I was born in 1947. My family lived in a suburban area nine miles from downtown Philadelphia. My father bought the house, a decrepit prerevolutionary stone farmhouse, during the Depression. He was a young man at the time and the house cost a pittance. He devoted much time and labor to restoring it. When he bought the property, the location looked more like open country than a suburb. Fields surrounded the one acre that came with the house. Two of the roads surrounding the house had not been paved. Our property included a stable where my father kept a horse. He also built a picturesque swimming pool with stone sides that was fed by a natural spring.

It was a special place to grow up. Too special, in fact. For one thing, the house was haunted by a secret: unmentionable memories of my father’s first wife and her suicide. Also, it was isolated—not just physically, but psychologically, too. This was a problem that befell many upwardly mobil

---

Excerpted from Hearts of the City by Herbert Muschamp
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.