Dear friends, for the next three weeks we continue with the 3rd part of the series “7 Houses from the 70s”, this time dedicated to the New York Five (Eisenman, Meier, Gwathmey, Graves, Hejduk). “The Five was never an official group, and its members had as much dividing them as joining them. All they really had in common, in a sense, was a commitment to the idea that pure architectural form took priority over social concerns, technology or the solving of functional problems. But that was enough to set them apart in the early 1970's, when architecture was still trying to shake itself out of the strange mix of corporate banality and heavy-handed brutalism that had characterized it in the 1960's. At that point the only really important alternative voice was Robert Venturi, who first gained attention by preaching a gospel of praise for ordinary architecture; in some ways The Five, in their determination to proclaim their work High Art, were responding to Venturi as much as to the commercial priorities of the big names of the 60's and 70's.“ (Paul Goldberger) John Hejduk, “who was always the most academic of the group and cultivates his image as an outsider so assiduously that he prefers not to jeopardize it” by nurturing any long-term affiliations, didn’t took part in any of the events subsequent to the launch of the 1972 seminal “Five Architects” book; in 1995, at the 23rd anniversary of the publication of the book, their event was instead called “(Four out of) Five Architects Reunion Evening”, recognizing Hejduk’s explicit departure. And then there were Four... (Cover Photo: © Josef Astor, “Skyscraper Couture”, Vanity Fair, July 1996. From left to right: Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman.)
