Gwathmey’s Death Further Diminishes ‘New York Five’ By ROBIN POGREBIN

August 11, 2009
Gwathmey’s Death Further Diminishes ‘New York Five’ By ROBIN POGREBIN

More than 40 years ago, a group of young Manhattan architects with a shared interest in the aesthetics of old-fashioned Modernism began getting together to talk about their work, their lives and the state of the field. And in the decades that followed, even as their styles grew apart — and as they became celebrities in and beyond the world of architecture — they continued talking.

But now the group, long known as the New York Five, is shrinking: After losing its first member, John Hejduk, in 2000, a second, Charles Gwathmey, died last week.

Following the news of Mr. Gwathmey’s death, at 71, friends and colleagues from within and outside the group spoke about his weekend houses on the East End of Long Island — especially one he designed for his parents, completed in 1966 — and his additions to public buildings, like the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art & Architecture Building at Yale, by Paul Rudolph.

But they also remembered his beginnings as one of the New York Five, or the Whites, as the group was also known because of its proclivity for white buildings inspired by the purist forms of Le Corbusier. Along with Mr. Gwathmey and Mr. Hejduk, the group included Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier.

The five men, who knew one another through the architecture schools they attended and taught in, were living in New York in the mid-1960s, just starting out as practicing architects and teachers.

“We were all involved in teaching and in practice and we respected each other’s work,” Mr. Meier recalled. “We decided to have a sort of Saturday morning discussion of what we were doing at the time. Each person brought one work.”

Mr. Graves said the meetings were also a way to continue the educations they had begun in architecture school. “We were all recent graduates,” he said, “used to juries and conversations with colleagues. And suddenly you’re out on the street and you’re not talking to anybody.”

“What united us was a need to convene with each other, to be self-critical, to talk about each other’s work,” he added.

Members of the Five also participated in a larger architectural group organized by Philip Johnson around 1970 that included the architect and historian Kenneth Frampton, then teaching at Princeton; Colin Rowe, another influential architectural historian and theoretician, from Cornell; and Arthur Drexler, then the curator and director of the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art.

Somewhere along the way, the five architects started taping the sessions and decided to turn the transcripts into “a little pamphlet,” Mr. Meier said, that would feature two houses by each of them. They couldn’t come up with a title (though the book came to be known as “Five Architects”), so they just put their last names on the white square cover in alphabetical order.

“We didn’t think anybody would read it,” Mr. Graves said.

The book, published by George Wittenborn in 1973, became a sensation. “It was a cause célèbre,” said the architect Robert A. M. Stern, dean of Yale’s architecture school. It was not so much that the five architects shared an aesthetic, Mr. Stern said; they had “a shared camaraderie and belief that the Modern movement of the 1920s and 1930s was worth revisiting.”

All of the five were surprised by the book’s impact, particularly “among students of architecture — in America and Europe as well,” Mr. Meier said. (Young architects in Italy knew them as “I Five di New York.”)

Mr. Graves said: “I think people were probably hungry for something other than commercial Modernism. We cared about urbanism and we cared what was said about architecture.”

Mr. Eisenman thought that architects with different sensibilities should review the book, and suggested the idea to Mr. Stern, who assembled a group that included Jaquelin T. Robertson and Charles Moore to do just that. Their responses to the book, a series of essays called “Five on Five,” were published in the magazine Architectural Forum; this second group came to be known as the Grays.

After the five Whites, along with some of the Grays, rose to various versions of architectural stardom in the 1980s, some critics argued that they were too concerned with the formal aspects of architecture.

“What was all the fuss about?” Paul Goldberger wrote of the White-Gray debate in The New York Times in 1993, on the occasion of an exhibition and lecture series called “Five Architects: Twenty Years Later” at the University of Maryland. “It was apparent to only a few people then that all these architects, Whites and Grays alike, had more in common than they had dividing them: at the end of the day they were all profoundly elitist, concerned mainly with the aesthetics of the single-family house, and determined to make architecture in a fairly traditional way.”

The architects had reunions of their own. “We continued our friendship, and that’s all it was, was a friendship,” said Mr. Graves, who recalled that Mr. Gwathmey called him “Gravesy.”

Mr. Gwathmey had an office three floors below Mr. Meier’s on 10th Avenue at 37th Street, in Manhattan. The two collaborated — along with Mr. Eisenman and Steven Holl — on a proposal in the 2002 competition to redesign the World Trade Center site. Their scheme featured five glass towers joined by interconnecting horizontal floors.

“This is the one people are going to be fighting about,” Herbert Muschamp wrote in The New York Times in 2002. “Superficially, the design ignores the lessons that postmodernism was supposed to have taught us about context, scale, accommodation and reassurance. It may strike some as a throwback to the megastructural superblocks of the 1960s. So what? The project makes its own kind of statement. Continuity with the epic ethos of the Modern era is part of what it has to say.”

When the architects were collaborating on the proposal, Mr. Gwathmey was always the first to arrive. “He was really into it,” Mr. Meier recalled. “It was the only thing we did as a team, and everyone really took part in an equal way — it wasn’t: ‘This was my idea.’ ”

Mr. Meier, who said he had known Mr. Gwathmey for 50 years, has particularly fond memories from the time when Mr. Gwathmey was first courting his second wife, Bette-Ann Damson, and they all picked corn for dinner in a field adjacent to a barn Mr. Meier was renting on the East End of Long Island.

“Charlie was a sweetheart,” Mr. Meier said.

Indeed, Mr. Gwathmey’s fellows say the architect’s occasionally gruff manner — he was known for firing off angry missives to critics and colleagues — was only on the surface. “He had a real rough exterior and told it like it was but was a real marshmallow inside,” Mr. Eisenman said.

Of the letters and e-mail messages, Mr. Eisenman said that Mr. Gwathmey’s friends often counseled him, “Write ’em, but don’t send ’em.” But sometimes Mr. Gwathmey couldn’t help himself. And when one of his buildings was panned by critics, he took it hard — particularly the recent harsh reviews of his Yale addition and of his glass residential tower at Astor Place in Manhattan. “They say architects have thick skins,” Mr. Graves said. “We don’t. It affects not just your well-being but it affects your practice.”

The last time Mr. Graves saw Mr. Gwathmey was at a meeting of the Philip Johnson group just a few months ago, at the Four Seasons restaurant. (Their usual location, the Century club, was under renovation.) The two sat next to each other.

The talk was mostly about the economy and how it was forcing them to let go of employees for the first time in memory. “We were all shocked that we were laying off 10 percent or more,” Mr. Graves said.

With Mr. Hejduk gone and now Mr. Gwathmey, Mr. Graves said he realized that “the New York Five” was bound to diminish over time. “It’s going to happen,” he said. “As we get older, the group will get smaller.”

“It was a great group,” he added. “Still is.”