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New York Five.
Term applied in the late 1960s and early 1970s to five architects practising in New York—Peter D. Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier—whose work was the subject of an exhibition at MOMA, New York, in 1969 and subsequent publication Five Architects (1972). These architects were related at that time in their allegiance to the forms and theories developed by Le Corbusier in the 1920s and 1930s. This is most clearly seen in the work of Graves, Gwathmey (for illustration see GWATHMEY, CHARLES) and Meier, while Hejduk was also strongly affiliated with Synthetic Cubism and Constructivism, and Eisenman (for illustration see EISENMAN, PETER D.) was deeply influenced by the work of the Italian Rationalist architect Giuseppe Terragni. Anticipating criticisms of this ‘Twenties Revivalism’, Colin Rowe challenged the idea of Modernism as the constant pursuit of originality by stating that the great revolutions in thought and form in the early 20th century were so ‘enormous as to impose a directive that cannot be resolved in any individual life span’ (Frampton and Rowe, 1972, p. 7). The most vehement critique of the work of the New York Five (referred to as the ‘Whites’) came in a group of essays, ‘Five on Five’ (1973), written by the architects Ronaldo Giurgola, Allan Greenberg (b 1938), Charles W. Moore, Jaquelin Robertson (b 1933) and Robert A. M. Stern (the ‘Grays’), whose theoretical affiliation was with Robert Venturi and Vincent Scully. Denying the existence of a ‘school’ and very anxious to nullify the possibility of Corbusian Modernism as a major tendency in the 1970s, they attacked the Five’s ‘lack of concern with siting’, the ‘unusability’ of their spaces and, particularly, their ‘élitism and hermeticism’—their treatment of architecture as ‘ "high art", divorcing it from day to day life’ (Robertson). The phenomenon of the New York Five is not to be seen as a school or movement but as a tendency signalling a deliberate reworking of early 20th-century Modernism in the face of a counter-tendency later defined as POST-MODERNISM. The work of the members of the New York Five subsequently developed in different directions.
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