Two exhibitions showcase Myron Goldfinger’s geometric genius through drawings and models
Architect’s Newspaper
Belmont Freeman - December 19, 2024
Installation view of Circle, Square, Triangle: The Houses I Never Lived In. The Residential Work of Myron Goldfinger 1963-2008. (Kelvin Dickinson/Courtesy the Paul Rudolph Institute For Modern Architecture)
Late 20th-century modern architecture is having its moment in New York this season, beginning with the Paul Rudolph exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a show that I (and others) found rather thin and predictable. More stimulating and unexpected are a pair of exhibitions at the Brutalist master’s namesake venue, the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture (PRIMA), and the Mitchell Algus Gallery: Both showcase the work of the recently deceased Myron Goldfinger, a prolific and singularly talented designer whose portfolio merits and rewards fresh examination.
Circle, Square, Triangle: Houses I Never Lived In. The Residential Work of Myron Goldfinger 1963-2008 at PRIMA’s home in the Rudolph-designed Modulightor building features Goldfinger’s residential projects, which constitute most of his built work. Downtown, the Mitchell Algus Gallery hosts Circle, Square, Triangle: A World I Wanted to Live in. The Public and Unbuilt Work of Myron Goldfinger 1963-2008, which demonstrates Goldfinger’s work on more varied building types and at larger scale.
The shared titling of these exhibitions references Goldfinger’s self-professed infatuation with Platonic geometric form. Strong geometry was an inspiration for many practitioners in the 1960s and ‘70s—think of the New York Five—but Goldfinger’s bold compositions of cubes, cylinders, and triangular blocks take the predilection to near-fetishistic extremes. His best work accrues a monumentality that bears the influence of Louis Kahn, under whom he studied at the University of Pennsylvania (where he was a student also of Paul Rudolph, whom Goldfinger always admired). To my eyes, the clarity of Goldfinger’s designs is a welcome respite after enduring the irrational computer-generated form making that has taken over architectural production in recent years.
Goldfinger grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Atlantic City. After graduating from Penn in 1955, he worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and in the office of Philip Johnson before establishing his own practice in 1966. That same year he married June Matkovic, an interior designer who worked alongside him for the duration of his career. Goldfinger made an early splash with the construction of his own home in the woods at Waccabuc, New York; the residence is a towering stack of cubes and triangular volumes clad in vertical cedar siding. The project was selected by the editors of Architectural Record for its 1971 edition of Record Houses.
At the same time, Goldfinger produced a much grander house for June’s parents, sited on the water in Sands Point, New York; the semicircular bays of which were meant to evoke the decks of boats owned by Mr. Matkovic’s shipping company. These early projects were followed by numerous commissions for houses in the New York area and, later, on the island of Anguilla, where Goldfinger became involved in the development of a resort community.
Goldfinger’s geometric compositions with their sharp play of light and shadow are naturally photogenic, and the exhibition at PRIMA includes many black and white images by Norman McGrath. McGrath, who surely knew every architect in town, selected Goldfinger to design his own home in Patterson, New York. The sculptural quality of Goldfinger’s houses is celebrated by several models built for the show by students at Pratt Institute, where Goldfinger taught for many years alongside Sybil Moholy-Nagy.
The photos and models are wonderful, but the stars of these two shows, as at the Rudolph exhibition at The Met, are the drawings. Goldfinger produced exuberant perspectives hand-rendered in pencil that convincingly and expressively place the houses in their sites and reveal the drama of their interiors. For me, seeing these drawings took me back to the mid-1970s when I was in school (at Penn, like Goldfinger) and we tried to emulate the drawing styles of the masters, including Romaldo Giurgola, Steve Izenour (at Venturi, Rauch and Scott-Brown) and, of course, Rudolph.
I applaud the decision by curators Kelvin Dickinson, president of PRIMA, and Eshaan Mehta to include several sheets of pencil-on-vellum working drawings that illustrate Goldfinger’s attention to detail and the handcrafting of architecture by drawing. June Goldfinger told me that while the finished presentation renderings were usually done by studio employees, Goldfinger was intimately involved in the drafting of the working drawings. I am grateful that I learned (at Davis, Brody & Associates) how buildings get built by tracing and adapting construction details and pity today’s interns who learn little more than to copy and paste in AutoCAD.
The mixed-media presentation of Goldfinger’s architecture looks right at home in the hyper-designed, residential-scaled setting on the top two floors of the Modulightor building. In the more conventional loft space of the Mitchell Algus Gallery, Goldfinger’s unbuilt work is, as one would expect, represented by drawings hung museum-style on well-lit walls. For me the stand-out piece is the expansive seagull’s-eye view of Goldfinger’s proposal for a huge residential development on Roosevelt Island, produced in 1975 for a competition that attracted entries by some 250 architects; Goldfinger’s was one of thirty-five published semifinalists. (This rendering and the best of others in the two shows are by Manuel Castedo, who worked for Goldfinger for several years before establishing his own successful practice.) Less dramatic but also ambitious is a series of plans and axonometrics for a system of prefabricated modular housing that recycled the cubic and triangular forms from his own house, illustrating Goldfinger’s interest in economical mass housing.
The twin Circle, Square, Triangle shows initiate a fruitful exploration of Myron Goldfinger’s legacy. It’s also a turning point for PRIMA, which until recently had been called the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation. With the cataloging, scanning, and display of the Goldfinger archive taking place in-house at PRIMA, with June’s participation, the effort validates its newly broadened mission to identify, study, and advocate for the preservation of the work of other modern architects of Rudolph’s and later generations, most of whom will likely not get exhibitions at The Met like Rudolph but who, like Goldfinger, have much to offer today’s scholars and practitioners.
Belmont Freeman is the founding principal of the New York City–based firm Belmont Freeman Architects.
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