A New Exhibition Surveys the Residential Work of New York Architect Myron Goldfinger

A month before architect Myron Goldfinger died last year, his wife, June Goldfinger, asked a question she had never posed during their six decades of personal and professional partnership. “Myron,” she said, “what is your architecture about? If you had one thing to say about your architecture, what would you say?” June was struck by the simplicity of Myron’s reply: “He just looked at me and he said ‘Circle, square, triangle.’”

Goldfinger’s gnomic utterance inspired the title for an exhibition on his legacy at the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture (PRIMA) in New York. Curated by PRIMA’s president and CEO, Kelvin Dickinson Jr., Circle, Square, Triangle: Houses I Never Lived In: The Residential Work of Myron Goldfinger 1963-2008 is on view until March 22, 2025. The exhibition’s subtitle comes from the forward to his 1992 monograph, Myron Goldfinger: Architect, in which Goldfinger recalled the glamorous homes he admired while growing up working class in Atlantic City, writing “I am always building the houses I never lived in as a boy.”