Richard Meier
The work of Richard Meier & Partners is instantly recognizable and have become local and international landmarks that include museums, cultural facilities, city halls and government office buildings, courthouses, libraries, educational buildings, television, radio and film production facilities, industrial research complexes, corporate headquarters facilities and private residences. The firm has worked on major urban design assignments in the United States, Prague, Edinburgh, Antwerp and Nice. Their buildings have received critical praise for their technical and architectural innovation as well as their subtle and sympathetic relationship to their contexts and the natural environment. A notable feature of the firm’s buildings is the innovative use of natural light. Their projects have received numerous awards including 29 National Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architects and 53 New York AIA and other AIA regional chapters.
Richard Meier
Richard Meier was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1934. He graduated from Cornell University. Before opening his own practice in 1963, he worked with Marcel Breuer as well as a number of architectural firms, notably Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill. Meier was one of the “New York Five,” architects, (Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, Richard Meier) who are known as the “white ”architects.” He began his practice with a commission to build a house in Essex Falls, New Jersey for his parents.
Meier has been awarded major commissions in the United States and Europe including courthouses, city halls, museums, corporate headquarters, housing and private residences. Larger scale, public buildings followed the conversion of the Old Bell Telephone Laboratories in Greenwich Village and include the Canal+ Television Headquarters in Paris; the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut; and the Bronx Developmental Center (now The Hutchinson Metro Center) in New York; The Hague City Hall and Central Library, Netherlands; and the Jubilee Church, Rome, Italy. Now considered one of the preeminent architects of museums, Meier has built The Getty Center (a six-building arts complex) in Brentwood, California; the Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia; the Frankfurt Museum for Decorative Arts in Germany; and The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, in Spain.
Meier has given numerous lectures throughout the world and participated in many juries. He has written and been the subject of many books and monographs and innumerable newspaper and magazine articles. In addition to being on the Board of Directors of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the American Academy in Rome, he is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the French and Belgian Academies d'Architecture, and a member of the Bund Deutscher Architekten and the American Academy of Arts & Letters, from which he received the Brunner Prize for Architecture in 1976.
Recognized with the highest honors available in architecture, in 1997 Meier received the AIA Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects as well as the Praemium Imperiale from the Japanese Government, in recognition of a lifetime achievement in the arts. He was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize with a citation from the jury that reads, ”In his search for clarity and his experiments in balancing light and space, he has created structures which are personal, vigorous, original.” Meier describes his own aesthetic, “…mine is a preoccupation with light and space; not abstract space, not scale less space, but space whose order and definition are related to light, to human scale and to the culture of architecture…” Richard Meier is also a sculptor whose works are of cast and welded metal.