His practice has included housing and private residences, museums, high-tech and medical facilities, commercial buildings and such major civic commissions as courthouses and city halls in the United States and Europe: Among his most well-known projects are the High Museum in Atlanta; the Frankfurt Museum for Decorative Arts In Germany; Canal+ Television Headquarters in Paris; the Hartford Seminary In Connecticut; the Atheneun in New Harmony, Indiana, and the Bronx Developmental Center in New York. All of these have received National Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
In 1984, Mr. Richard Meier was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the field's highest honor and often equated with the Nobel Prize. In the same year, Mr. Richard Meier was selected architect for the prestigious commission to design the new $1 billion Getty Center in Los Angeles, California.
Richard Meier has maintained a specific and unalterable attitude toward the design of buildings from the moment Richard Meier first entered architecture. Although his later projects show a definite refinement from his earlier projects, Richard Meier clearly authored both based on the same design concepts. With admirable consistency and dedication, Richard Meier has ignored the fashion trends of modern architecture and maintained his own design philosophy. Richard Meier has created a series of striking, but related designs. Richard Meier usually designs white Neo-Corbusian forms with enameled panels and glass. These structure usually play with the linear relationships of ramps and handrails. Although all have a similar look, Richard Meier manages to generate endless variations on his singular theme.
Richard Meier, the main figure in the "New York Five", which by the second half of the 1960's, included some of the leaders of the Post-Modern movement - Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Michael Graves and Charles Gwathmey, creates designs with a unified theme based on neo-modern beliefs in purist architecture. Richard Meier 's white sculptural pieces have created a new vocabulary of design for the 1980s.
related links Richard Meier & Partners, Architects LLP
Richard Meier - Great Buildings Online
The three of the most significant concepts of Richard Meier 's work are Light, Color and Place. His architecture shows how plain geometry, layered definition of spaces and effects of light and shade, allow Richard Meier to create clear and comprehensible spaces. The main issue Richard Meier is focusing on as an architect, is what Richard Meier termed placeness: "What is it that makes a space a place." According to Richard Meier there are ten factors that connect a building to its environment, one or more of which must be present for a space to be a place: factors which cause the Mode of Being; those which emphasize the presence of the building as an independent object; factors which emphasize the presence of the building in its given environment; those which encourage fantasy and play; factors which encourage ecstatic exuberance; factors which preserve a sense of mystery and adventure; ingredients which connect us to reality; those which link the building to its past; facilitate spontaneous exchanges; and affirm people's identity.
Richard Meier was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1934. Richard Meier graduated from Cornell University in 1957 then worked with a series of architects, including Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill and Marcel Breuer. Richard Meier established his own practice in 1963.
