Richard Meier
Sober, clean, rational lines. White used as a color, rather than as an absence. These features uniquely define the work of architect Richard Meier. Born in 1934, Meier studied architecture at Cornell, and established his own practice in New York City in 1963. In 1967, his work was brought to the attention of the general public in a MoMA exhibition highlighting the work of five modernist architects under the double aegis of Le Corbusier and Philip Johnson. Meier's ideas, first incarnated in the rationally designed Smith House, with its strict programmatic separation between public and private areas, would soon see implementation on a larger scale, with the construction of the Westbeth Artists' Housing (1967-1970), and the Bronx Developmental Center (1970-1976). Multiple private and public buildings followed, which culminated in Meier's commission for the Getty Center, in 1984. This monumental undertaking was completed in 1997. The building possibly stands as the fullest realization of Meier's ideas to date, with its marriage between a rationally gridded modernist architecture and the natural topological features that define the site on a hill in Los Angeles. In 1984, Meier was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize for his work, and multiple prizes have followed, in the USA and abroad, in the years since. His most recent project is the Italcementi Center for Research and Innovation in Bergamo, Italy.
