Richard Meier - The New York Five (29/36)

We were all teaching and working in New York, Peter Eisman, John Hayduk, Charles Guatemi, Michael Graves, and myself. And I had taught at Princeton with Michael, and then Peter came to Princeton, and I went to Cooper Union, where I taught with John Hayduk. We were all kind of milling around, talking together, and I think it was Peter that said, look, why don't we have a little session, and we'll get a conference room somewhere, and the five of us will each present a project that we're working on at the time, and we'll invite a few other people to be kind of critics. Colin Rose, Stan Anderson, I can't remember who else was there. And then they'll kind of criticize the work that we present. And we got Arthur Drexler, who was chairman of the Department of Architecture, to agree that we could use a conference room at MoMA for this session. And there must have been a dozen people there, not many more, maybe a few more than a dozen, not many. And we each presented a project, and we had a discussion, and of course Peter had a tape recorder there. I think I still have the tape somewhere. And the whole thing was taped. And afterwards, hey, that was really fun. Why don't we put out a little pamphlet to commemorate this event? Six or eight, ten pages, nothing. Maybe ten pages, everyone gets two pages, I remember. So it's going to be ten pages plus a little introduction by Arthur Drexler and maybe some comments by Colin Rose, and that would be it. So it took, you know, in order to put all this material together, because what we presented was work that we were doing at the time, but we didn't really have it all in presentable form. So it took a long time to kind of get it together. And by the time we got it together, Peter said, look, it's taken so long, why don't we not just show that project, but we'll show what we're currently working on as well. So each person gets two projects to show. And instead of two pages each, you get ten pages each, I don't know, something like that. And that went on for another year, putting this together, because John Haydock wanted color to show his project. And then we said, well, if John has color, Michael will get color. And then the expense goes up, and it became a real point of discussion. At any rate, then we didn't have a publisher, because, you know, we were doing all this. And we got George Wittenborn, because I used to go to Wittenborn every Saturday morning to buy books. He said, okay, Wittenborn, would you publish it? And they did. And we then finally got out the book, Five Architects, just as a momentum. Little did we know it had this huge influence on what was happening.