The New York Five

The New York Five refers to a group of five New York City architects (Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier) whose photographed work was the subject of a CASE (Committee of Architects for the Study of the Environment) meeting at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by Arthur Drexler and Colin Rowe in 1969, and featured in the subsequent book Five Architects, published by Wittenborn in 1972, then more famously by Oxford Press in 1975.

These five had a common allegiance to a pure form of architectural modernism, harking back to the work of Le Corbusier in the 1920s and 1930s, although on closer examination their work was far more individual. The grouping may have had more to do with social and academic allegiances, particularly the mentoring role of Philip Johnson.

The book evoked a stinging rebuke in the May 1973 issue of Architectural Forum, a group of essays called "Five on Five", written by architects Romaldo Giurgola, Allan Greenberg, Charles Moore, Jaquelin T. Robertson, and Robert A. M. Stern. These five architects [Guirgola et al.], known as the "Greys", attacked the "Whites" [Eisenmann et al.] on the grounds that this pursuit of the pure modernist aesthetic resulted in unworkable buildings that were indifferent to site, indifferent to users, and divorced from daily life. These "Grays" were aligned with Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi and the emerging interest in vernacular architecture, New Classical Architecture and early postmodernism. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Eisenman and Robertson were in partnership, though they designed and credited their work separately.

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