I didn’t learn this until I was catching up on the Little Minx, but Herbert Muschamp has left his position as New York Times architecture critic. Put aside all the concerns about Muschamp’s apparent biases toward his architect friends; I wasn’t aware of any of that. All I know is that I could never understand what the hell the guy was writing about. His words were fascinating, but they left me feeling alternately uncultured and exasperated. As Judith Shulevitz wrote:

Muschamp’s most idiosyncratic and notorious bit of metaphor-making came at the end of his rave write-up of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. After leaving the building, he spotted a woman alone on the corner, and asked himself, “Why can’t a building catch a moment like that?” Then, he realized, “the reason I’d had that thought was that I’d just come from such a building. And that the building I’d just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.” Startled by this leap in logic? Let Muschamp explain: What they share is that their style “is voluptuous, emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material, mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child. It can’t resist doing a dance with all the voices that say ‘No.’ It wants to take up a lot of space. And when the impulse strikes, it likes to let its dress fly up in the air.”

I love looking at architecture, but — in part because of Muschamp’s columns — I’ve always wondered if perhaps I was too stupid to appreciate it. Maybe now I’ll start to realize that’s not true.