FIVE ARCHITECTS
EISENMAN, GRAVES, GWATHMEY, HEJDUK, MEIER
Arthur Drexler [preface]
Arthur Drexler [preface]: FIVE ARCHITECTS: EISENMAN, GRAVES, GWATHMEY, HEJDUK, MEIER. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. First edition thus. Quarto. Textured decorated paper covered boards. Black endpapers. 138 pp. Fully illustrated with black and white photographs, floor plans and axiometric rendering. One color plate. Vintage plastic sleeve lightly adherring to boards and endsheets. The white boards reveal lightly wear to edges and gutters, but a very good copy of this Postmodernist Urtext, and the first copy hardcover copy we have handled.
10.5 x 10.5 hardcover book with 138 pages devoted to the residential work of Peter Eisenman, Michael Grave, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier. Preface by Arthur Drexler, introduction by Colin Rowe and postcript by Philip Johnson.
Five Architects, originally published in 1972, grew out of a meeting of the CASE group (Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment) held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969. The purpose of this gathering was to exhibit and criticize the work of five architects–Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, and Meier–who constituted a New York school, and who are now among the most influential architects working today.
The buildings shown here have more diversity than one might expect from a school, but share certain properties of form, scale, and treatment of material. Providing complete drawings and photographic documentation, this collection also includes a comparative critique by Kenneth Frampton, an Introduction by Colin Rowe that suggests a still broader context for the work as a whole, and two short texts in which individual positions are outlined.
New York Times Architecture Critic Paul Goldberger published “A Little Book That Led Five Men to Fame” on February 11, 1996: IT'S STILL NOT ENTIRELY CLEAR what it meant for the history of architecture, but the day in 1972 when Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier banded together to produce a spare, black-and-white book called "Five Architects" was surely the beginning of high-end architectural marketing.
In 1973, when the book was published by George Wittenborn, Mr. Gwathmey, the youngest of the group, was 35; the oldest, Mr. Hedjuk, was 44, and they were little known beyond a circle of academacs and a handful of clients for whom they had built small houses in places like Princeton and eastern Long Island. Shortly, they were The Five, standard-bearers of a movement to elevate modernist architectural form into a serious theoretical pursuit. After that they rose, in a stunning trajectory, from the status of cult figures of the late 1970's to full-fledged celebrities of the 1980's.
Two of The Five, Mr. Eisenman and Mr. Graves, even managed to ride the wave of chic all the way to profiles in Vanity Fair magazine, and by the end of the 1980's four of The Five were designing so many buildings for prominent names from Hollywood and Wall Street that their client lists read like gossip columns.
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.
It was all a very long time ago, as I realized one day last month when I attended a symposium observing, if this makes any sense, the 23d anniversary of the publication of "Five Architects." It featured all of the group except Mr. Hejduk, dean of the architecture school at Cooper Union, 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 showing up. The event was called (Four out of) Five Architects Reunion Evening (the punctuation is theirs), and it was sponsored by the Municipal Art Society and its Urban Center bookstore. The bookstore did not exist when the original, modest "Five Architects" book was first published, but it has since sold enough copies of the voluptuous coffee-table monographs issued individually by The Five that its staff must consider Mr. Graves the equivalent of Danielle Steel.
The evening attracted an overflow crowd, most of whom looked young enough to have been in kindergarten when "Five Architects" was published. Missing were virtually all the colleagues of The Five, not to mention most architectural journalists; the evening seemed to belong to those who knew these men mainly as names, not as peers, and it came off as a curious combination of a wannabe intellectual salon and a celebrity-seeking talk show.
Suzanne Stephens, a prominent freelance architectural journalist, was the moderator. The evening turned out to be far more intriguing in concept than in reality; almost nothing significant was said by anybody. Thus it served 's yet another reminder of one of the great architectural truths: there is no connection between the ability to make good architecture and the ability to express ideas clearly in words. (Indeed, I wonder if there is not actually an inverse relationship between the two: that the architects who talk most clearly are the ones who design least clearly.)
Peter Eisenman was the most articulate -- proof, perhaps, that this last theory may be correct -- and he certainly did the best at putting the gestation of "Five Architects" in context. "It was a time when it was very difficult to talk about architecture," Mr. Eisenman said of the mid-1960's, when the architects began their careers. "It was a wild time politically and socially. People were thinking of Vietnam, of black-voter registration drives. Nobody wanted to talk about form, which is what we thought architecture should be about."
THE MEN SAW THEIR MISSION as not to avoid social responsibility but to bring a level of seriousness, of gravity, to a profession that they believed had ceased to think in intellectual terms. "We wanted to prove that architecture was not only about image, but about idea," Mr. Gwathmey said.
And so they did focus on ideas -- for a while. The architectural dialogue that began with "Five Architects" continued with the publication of "Five on Five," a series of essays in Architectural Forum written by architects who took issue with the modernist stance of The Five. One essayist was Robert A. M. Stern, who organized the counter-group, which included Charles Moore, Allan Greenberg, Romaldo Giurgola and Jaquelin T. Robertson. It was a lively period when the whole notion of serious debate over what role architecture could play in the culture seemed infused with fresh energy.
But paradoxically, as the five men became more successful, what Mr. Gwathmey disdained is precisely what the architects came to symbolize: the triumph of image over idea. They gave in to the allure of image in very different ways, for their work and their identities diverged more and more as the years went on. But by the late 1980's every one of The Five had become a kind of icon, almost a logo, for something.
In the case of Mr. Gwathmey and his partner, Robert Siegel, it was as providers of a kind of sumptuous, meticulously wrought modernist grandeur for the rich and famous, particularly in the entertainment industry, where a Gwathmey Siegel house became for the 1980's the badge of success that a great Georgian mansion by Delano & Aldrich had been in the 1920's.
Mr. Meier, who in 1984 won the commission to build the vast, new J. Paul Getty arts complex in Los Angeles, came increasingly to stand for a kind of sleek, shimmeringly elegant corporate modernism, applied in identical fashion to museums, corporate headquarters and houses.
Mr. Graves turned away from the abstraction of his early years in search of a personal style that turned out to be a sort of cross between classicism and cubism; spurred along by major commissions from clients like Humana Inc., the health-care giant in Louisville, Ky., and the Walt Disney Company, not to mention a willingness to design everything from shopping bags to tea kettles, he and his style became widely known to the general public.
Mr. Eisenman has continued to produce a smattering of his own highly theoretical buildings while trying at least as hard to play the role of public intellectual. At the same time he has struggled relentlessly to maintain a high public profile as the keeper of the flame of lively architectural dialogue.
Mr. Hejduk teaches and writes and continues to run the architecture school of Cooper Union as a kind of monastery, exuding passion for form, and certitude that teaching works best when it is set apart from the concerns of the real world. In one sense, for all Mr. Hejduk's determination to keep himself at a remove from the celebrity culture, he is the most image-conscious of all The Five. He has positioned himself brilliantly as a Woody Allen-esque figure, disdaining popular appeal while making it absolutely certain that people know who he is and what he stands for.
They are, all five of them, triumphant successes in some obvious ways, and sobering reminders in other ways that are not as easy to perceive. Every one has produced work of quality while remaining true to the passion for architecture that generated his career. Yet each, by his very success, has also become a bit of a caricature, at times too predictable, too easy to sum up. Is this the risk of achieving fame in our age? Five careers, each with its own arc, driven by that curious combination of idea and image that characterizes art at the end of the 20th century.