A retrospective of the work of American architect Richard Meier is currently at The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) until April 15th, 2001.
The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the installation was specially designed by Richard Meier for the NAI Main Room.
Meier reconfirms his statements about architecture with the exhibition design.
Photo: Kirsten Kiser
The Museum of Television and Radio,
Beverly Hills, California 1994-96
The exhibition includes more than fifty models and original sketches, eighty collages and an audiovisual presentation covering Meier’s early works, like the Smith House, as well as some of his most recent projects such as the United States Federal Courthouse in New York and the Church of the Year 2000 in Rome.
Courtesy Richard Meier and Partners
Model of Federal Building and United States Courthouse
Islip, New York
1993-2000
Courtesy Richard Meier and Partners
Model of Church of the Year 2000
Rome, Italy
1996-2001
Courtesy Richard Meier and Partners
Perry Street Residential Towers
New York, New York
1999-2001
The exhibition also includes thirty study models from the Getty Center in Los Angeles as well as the final model of the Center at 1:50 scale; over ten meters long and five meters wide.
Photo: Kirsten Kiser
Cooling off at The Getty Center
Los Angeles, California
Photo courtesy Richard Meier & Partners
Collage November 14, 1998
More Richard Meier Collages
About Richard Meier.
Meier embarked on his architecture career in 1963, with a house for his parents in Essex Fells, New Jersey. In 1965 he made a name for himself in the United States with his design for another private residence - the Smith House in Darien, Connecticut. Various commissions for private housing followed, but he was also designing more and more public buildings. His designs for the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (1980-1983), the Applied Art Museum in Frankfurt (1979-1985) and the Getty Center in Los Angeles (1984-1997) won him international acclaim as an important architect of museums.
His first completed building in the Netherlands was the head office of KNP (Royal Dutch Paper Mills) in Hilversum which today is occupied by Endemol Entertainment. Meier won the competition to design the City Hall and Central Library in The Hague chiefly because of his solution for integrating the complex into the city centre. The street runs through the building, creating an interior courtyard - forty-seven metres in height and the largest covered atrium in Europe. Meier's buildings are not only in a built-up city centres like The Hague, but often in an open setting, allowing for the integration of the architecture with the natural surroundings. In Meier's view Man will never succeed in equaling nature, and so should not seek to imitate it. Rather the contrast between nature and architecture actually enables us to experience nature with more intensity.
Meier's designs still evidence the ideals of the New York Five. In 1972 the five architects - Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Michael Graves and Charles Gwathmey - published a book entitled 'Five Architects', in which they traced their modernist ideas on autonomous architecture and a return to the premises of Le Corbusier's work. Meier especially examined Le Corbusier's spatial and stylistic principles: layered composition, abstract concept of space, formal clarity and a complete absence of ornament. For instance, in his design for the City Hall and Library in The Hague, he utilizes geometrical shapes, a frequent use of footbridges and his characteristic facade of white metal panels. He has also used a lot of glass, making the building very light and the surroundings highly visible.
To this very day Meier has remained true to the New York Five's nickname, 'The Whites'. White for him is one of the ways to achieve a powerful, clear form: "It is the color which, in natural light, reflects and intensifies the perception of all of the shades of the rainbow, the colors which are constantly changing in nature, for the whiteness of white is never just white; it is almost always transformed by light and that which is changing: the sky, the clouds, the sun and the moon."
Photo: Kirsten Kiser
Friesen House
Los Angeles, California
1998 - 2000
Photo courtesy Richard Meier & Partners
Canal+ Headquarters
Paris, France
1988-1992
Meier expressed this view on the consistent use of the blinding white color during his
acceptance speech for the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1984. Not long after, he received his biggest and most important commission: to design the Getty Center (1984-1997) in Los Angeles. The Getty Center is a 50-hectare complex on a hilltop beside the San Diego Freeway. It is a campus of six buildings, including a museum, library, research center and conservation institute. For The Getty Center Meier combined his characteristic metal panels with a rough hewn travertine from the south of Italy. The natural stone facades and low buildings blend well with the natural character of the hilltop site.
Website: Richard Meier & Partners
