Richard Meier

Following my recent post on the Getty Museum, I wanted to provide a profile of one of the best modern architects of our time: Richard Meier.

His accomplishments are nearly impossible to list, but here are a few highlights:

The Getty Center in Los Angeles, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Frankfurt Museum for Decorative Arts in Germany, the Canal Plus Television Headquarters in Paris, and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art.

Awards include: The Pratt Legend Award, The Pritzker Architecture Prize, American Institute of Architects (gold medal), Guild Hall Lifetime Achievement Award & The Frate Sole International Award for Sacred Architecture.

  Getty

(Via an interview with Pritzker)…Explaining his own roots, Meier says, "Le Corbusier was a great influence, but there are many influences and they are constantly changing. Frank Lloyd Wright was a great architect, and I could not have done my parent’s house the way that I did, without being overwhelmed by Falling Water." Meier continued, "We are all affected by LeCorbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, and Mies van der Rohe. But no less than Bramante, Borromini and Bernini. Architecture is a tradition, a long continuum. Whether we break with tradition or enhance it, we are still connected to that past. We evolve."

In 1963, he established his private practice, and working from his apartment, launched the business with a commission for his mother and father, a residence in Essex Fells, New Jersey. "Thank God for one’s parents," said Meier, "and their faith in us." In 1965, one of his early residential commissions, Smith House in Darien, Connecticut thrust him into national prominence.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona

Looking back on it now, Meier spoke of "the clarity of the building, the openness, the direct articulation of private and public spaces, how it relates to the land and water." He added, "It’s been over 17 years, and what was innovative and captured a great many people’s imagination and admiration then, is already a part of our language, and somewhat taken for granted today."
Other commissions for private homes followed, along with some more public projects. In 1967, he began work on the conversion of the old Bell Telephone Laboratories in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village to accommodate some 1200 people in 383 apartment units. The result was hailed in the architectural community as the first evidence that ultimately, Meier’s greatest achievements might lie in larger-scaled more public works. "This too is an example of how quickly we assimilate," said Meier. "’The phrase, ‘adaptive re-use,’ wasn’t even in the language then. We were really pioneering a new area."

Jubilee Church

In 1979, after devoting nearly five years of work to it, Meier completed another work, which prompted Ada Louise Huxtable to write in the New York Times, that the building advances "conventional modernist practice provocatively beyond established limits." The building referred to is known as The Atheneum, situated on the banks of the Wabash River in the restoration community of New Harmony, Indiana.

On an even grander scale, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia was completed in 1983. It opened to enormous media attention and Paul Goldberger, architecture critic of the New York Times, wrote in the June, 1983 issue of Vogue: "It is no accident, then, that Richard Meier is becoming one of the preeminent architects of museums."

In addition to the High Museum, he has designed a major museum for Frankfurt, Germany, an addition to the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, as well as many other types of commissions around the world.