Richard Meier Architect

Five Architects, originally published in 1975, 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. Collectively, their work makes a modest claim: it is only architecture, not the salvation of man and the redemption of the earth. No matter how varied their individual theories and visions, all five architects simply share a passion for the art of architecture. 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. Now back in print, Five Architects serves as a reference to the early work of some of America's most important architects and provides us with a glimpse back at the direction of architecture as they saw it twenty years ago.