Herbert Muschamp, 59, the controversial former New York Times architecture critic whose influential and highly personal commentaries dwelled less on the formal properties of buildings than on their emotional impact, died Tuesday of lung cancer in New York.
For 12 years ending in 2004, Muschamp was one of the nation’s most provocative and analyzed critics, who wrote with hallmark exuberance. One of his most quoted reviews was a paean to the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Muschamp declared that it was “the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe” for a voluptuous style that “likes to let its dress fly up in the air.”
In a 1995 review of Denver architecture in The Times, Muschamp called Denver International Airport, the library and Coors Field, respectively, “a Big Top airport”; a “Classics Illustrated” library; and a “Those Were the Days ball park.” It was all, Muschamp wrote, part of “a return-to-childhood motif, a sense of lost wonder recalled.”
Calling Denver “the City of the Saved,” he concluded, “Perhaps these buildings are compensation for the innocence that was battered out of the boomers when they discovered that even they would grow old.”
Muschamp was born in Philadelphia in 1947. He dropped out of college after two years and moved to New York, where he often hung out at Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory. He began to study architecture at New York’s Parsons School of Design and eventually taught architecture there.
By the mid-1980s, he was writing criticism for Vogue and Art Forum. In 1987, he became the New Republic’s first full-time architecture critic. In 1992, he succeeded Paul Goldberger as The New York Times’ architecture critic.
Tony Ryan, 71, who founded Europe’s leading budget airline Ryanair, died Wednesday after a long illness, the airline and his family said.
Ryan founded Ryanair in 1985 with a single 15-seat plane. By the time he floated the company on the Irish and British stock exchanges, Ryanair Holdings PLC was already expanding across the European continent with eye-popping fares, new routes and trademark boastful marketing.
Today, it operates 557 routes in 26 countries and plans to carry more than 50 million people this year.
Ryan was the son of a train driver. His first job was a sales clerk at Aer Lingus, Ireland’s state-owned airline – which saw its monopoly status shattered by the launch and rapid ascent of Ryanair.
