Libeskind's original design for Freedom Tower may not have been the only casualty of the fallout surrounding the World Trade Center Competition. Herbert Muschamp may have been another. Muschamp quietly disappeared from the Times this summer. He has reappeared with little formal explanation in the Sunday magazine writing about a much broader range of cultural issues. I say that the World Trade Center may have been his undoing because in a previous email he said that he was going to write an exposé on the Trade Center Competition. He never got the the job and David Dunlop, the son of a former SOM partner and the columnist who writes more about the social and business machinations surrounding local real estate developments, wrote a piece about the competition instead. In an ironic twist, Paul Goldberger, the fomer NY Times architecture critic whose tenure Muschamp fairly (IMHO) characterizes as "serving real estate interests," just wrote a book about the competition. Nicolai Oursoroff has come to the NY Times from the LA Times. He left the paper soon after the Tribune Company, the boss of Tribune Architecture Critic Blair Kamin, purchased the paper.

What does Oursoroff bring to the table? What do we miss in Muschamp? We'll write more on that in the coming weeks... Meanwhile, what do you think?