Richard Meier

Architect

• Born: October 12, 1934
• Place of Birth: Newark, New Jersey

ARCHITECT AND ARTIST

Meier is an internationally recognized architect, who developed a consistent, distinctive modern style noted for its white surfaces and geometrical designs.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Architecture and design; art

Early Life

Richard Meier (MI-ur) was born in Newark, New Jersey, on October 12, 1934, into a middle-class, liberal Jewish family, and he grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey. He could have entered the family’s tanning business, but early on he took an interest in architecture. At Central High School he took classes in art and art history, and in his home basement studio he drew or made models of ships, planes, and houses. To follow current trends, he read Architectural Forum and House Beautiful. One summer he worked as an intern at a local architectural firm and saw how drawings were translated into buildings. The following summer he worked as an apprentice house carpenter, learning how blueprints were turned into buildings.

In 1952, Meier chose to attend Cornell University instead of Harvard University or Yale University because Cornell offered architecture as an undergraduate program. In addition, he bypassed the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) because Cornell was more design oriented. He also studied painting and subsequently became a designer, a sculptor, and a creator of collages.

After graduating in 1957, Meier began a series of apprenticeships at Davis, Brody, and Wisniewski (1958–1959); Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (1959–1960), where he learned how a large corporate firm worked; and Marcel Breuer and Associates (1960–1963).

Between his first two jobs, Meier toured Europe, where he saw buildings of Le Corbusier, whose work he had studied at Cornell. Meier admired the white purist masterpieces of Le Corbusier with their brutal but delicate, unfinished, precast concrete construction. The formal properties of Le Corbusier’s work of the 1920s and 1930s are evident in Meier’s work.

Life’s Work

In 1963, Meier set up his own practice and began his teaching career at Cooper Union, New York, later also teaching at Princeton University, Harvard, and Yale. His early works were private houses, notably the Smith House (1967–1967), the Saltzman House (1967), and the Douglas House (1971–1973), the last a strongly vertical, white structure situated on a steep wooded hillside overlooking a river. These homes were built in the prevailing modernist style: the designs stressed artificial and abstract treatment of geometric forms and space, tectonic clarity, layered composition, and strong verticals and horizontals. Already Meier’s characteristic white, pristine surfaces, free of ornament, are the dominant impression. Although well situated in their sites, the houses stand in sharp contrast to nature.

Meier’s inclusion in the 1969 exhibition The New York Five at the Museum of Modern Art brought his work to attention in the United States. In 1972, the book Five Architects included Meier (along with Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, and John Hejduk) as among the “whites,” who stood for the rational, constructional approach to the modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright, De Stijl, and Le Corbusier, versus the “grays,” or the emerging postmodernist movement around Robert Stern and associated with Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.

Meier’s growing reputation led to major institutional commissions, including the Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana (1975–1979); the Bronx Developmental Center, New York (1970–1977); the Hartford Seminary, Connecticut (1978–1981); the Museum für Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt, Germany (1979–1985); the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (1980–1983); the Canal+ Television Headquarters in Paris (1992); and the Federal Building and US Courthouse, Islip, New York (1993–1999).

In his youth, Meier went to temple on Fridays, and when he married Katherine Gormley, a Catholic, in 1979, their wedding service had both a rabbi and a priest. The family celebrated the major Jewish holidays as well as Christmas; their children were raised Jewish but did not attend Hebrew school. (Meier and Gormley eventually divorced.) Early in his career, Meier helped install exhibits in the Jewish Museum, one of which was Recent American Synagogue Architecture (1963). For Meier, religion and its purpose can be expressed in architecture that affects all people, regardless of their denomination. The organization of churches for different faiths, however, need to be different in order to provide, for example, for a baptistery or confessionals. Synagogue design often deals with the conflicting requirements of the space (to serve for worship and for holding banquets) and the need to differentiate between Shabbat and Yom Kippur. The pure white geometric forms of his architecture suggest little relationship to Jewish religious thought.

The high point of Meier’s career was receiving the commission to design the Getty Center in Los Angeles (1984–1997). On a 110-acre hilltop site, the Getty Center campus appears as a shining city on a hill, the Acropolis, or the whitewashed villages of the Mediterranean. For the Getty, Meier created a cluster of buildings, with a variety of interior and exterior spaces, opening out on all sides to vistas of the Pacific Ocean and of mountains.

Meier's next major project was the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Located on the north part of the campus, the building is built of Meier's signature white stone and features loft-style classrooms that can be used for design classes and easily repurposed.

Meier wrote that his architecture is a preoccupation with “space whose order and definition are related to light, to human scale, and to the culture of architecture. Architecture is vital and enduring because it contains us; it describes space, space we move through, exist in, and use.”

Meier’s design vocabulary has remained unchanged, and his work is among the most consistent and instantly recognizable of modern architects. Obvious is his almost obsessive use of white surfaces and abstract manipulation of space, form, light, and surface details. Meier has been influenced by and collaborated with his friend the painter Frank Stella; and Meier’s style has affinities with the “California Light and Space” artists of the mid-1960s, who manipulated artificial and natural light to make light tangible.

His facades are geometrically articulated by grids of windows, doors, balconies, columns, white panels, pipe railings, ramps, and terraces. His facades also reflect the collages that he creates as well as the eye of the abstract painter and sculptor. While the austerity and complexity of his buildings are modern, their calmness evokes another era.

For Meier, the history of architecture is not something to be rejected but rather a source of ideas and methods. He reinterprets and reassembles the conventional, pure architectural forms. The infusion of natural or artificial light into his interiors creates spaces that dazzle the eye, with the intensity of the white surfaces; light makes his spaces expressive and perceptible. Meier has won numerous architecture awards, including the Pritzker Prize (1984) and the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (1989).

In March 2018, some of his female employees accused him of sexual assault and sexual harassment. After this, Meier took a six-month leave of absence from his architecture firm. In 2021, three years after the accusations, he resigned.

Significance

Meier has enjoyed international success as an architect. His work is of the highest consistency and integrity and is instantly recognizable. Characteristic is his use of white surfaces and his abstract manipulation of geometric forms. He extends the spatial and formal experiments of the early twentieth century modern masters Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Wright. In his commitment to a visual aesthetic of modern abstraction, his architecture achieves a pristine purity and clarity of vision and style.

Bibliography

Blazer, Werner. Richard Meier: Details. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1996. Print.

Meier, Richard. Building the Getty. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Print.

Pogrebin, Abigail. Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. New York: Broadway, 2005. Print.

Pogrebin, Robin. "Five Women Accuse the Architect Richard Meier of Sexual Harassment." The New York Times, 13 Mar. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/arts/design/richard-meier-sexual-harassment-allegations.html. Accessed 2 Sept. 2025.

Richard Meier, Architect, 1964/1984-2004/2009. 5 vols. New York: Rizzoli, 1984-2009. Print.

Richard Meier: The Architect as Designer and Artist. New York: Rizzoli, 2003. Print.

"Richard Meier Wins German Architecture Award." Globe Newswire, 11 Mar. 2022, www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/03/11/2401892/0/en/Richard-Meier-Wins-German-Architecture-Award.html. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.