The Brooklyn 5, aka The Architect's Half Dozen: a group of egg-cellent creations completed in Brooklyn Heights by 5 young architects (and an unsuspecting lawyer) one steamy Easter Sunday. Each of the 5 is sited on paper towels on or adjacent to some Ikea furniture. Each project focused on the institution of celebrating rebirth, loosely defined by religion, hollowness, and color. These commonalities became a framework for Prosecco-infused discussion that illuminated individual polemics and debate about experimentation in today’s archit-egg-tural landscape. Despite the initial appearance of diversity within the set, each project sought to address a common set of ideas emerging organically (and cage-free) within the discourse of architecture at large (or were they medium-sized?).

Primarily addressing the legacy of Postmortem-ism (in its various gauzes and forms), each artist sought to engage childhood memories, local flavor, and a renewed concern for the reciprocity between dye and vinegar. Each was interested in a delicate or speckle-ative way to use sponges, and their associated values of porosity, special brushes, and plastic dippers to produce new combinations of pastels. In that sense, each sought a contemporary way to learn from the past that would have particular resonance in today’s social, political, and cultural omelet.

The identity of the group of 5 remains hidden (much like their creations; coincidentally, the prize for discovery is a big chocolate bunny) and is meant as a provocation toward two related issues: the desire for individuality and expression by today’s younger generation of architects (who, let's be honest, may be a little too old for this particular endeavor) incubated in a world of Whites and Grays; and secondly, the desire for consensus within this (breakfast) course on what counts today as crackable and seculo-theological concerns for architecture. The inspiration behind the feature is to reveal an inside joke which demonstrates an effort to poke fun at a set of ideas that previously were published in several daily architecture productions. The feature was hatched by a couple of eggheads with a little too much time on their hands, apparently.