Richard Meier Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Richard Meier (born 1934) is an American architect known for crisp white buildings of porcelain-enamelled panels, glass and geometric order, inspired by Le Corbusier and the light they capture. A member of the New York Five, he designed the Smith and Douglas houses, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1984.

Newark, Cornell and New York

Meier was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934 and graduated in architecture from Cornell University in 1957. He travelled in Europe, met Le Corbusier, and worked for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and for Marcel Breuer before opening his own office in New York in 1963. One of his first works was a house for his parents in Essex Fells, New Jersey (1965).

The New York Five and the white houses

Meier’s Smith House in Darien, Connecticut (1967), and Douglas House on Lake Michigan (1973) established his language of white surfaces, ramps and layered glass. With Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk he was featured in Five Architects (1972), and the Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana (1979), confirmed his reputation.

Museums and the Pritzker Prize

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta (1983) and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt (1985) were followed by the Pritzker Prize in 1984, at the age of 49. In Europe he built the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (1995), the Jubilee Church in Rome (2003) and the museum for the Ara Pacis (2006).

The Getty Center and later years

Meier’s largest commission, the Getty Center in Los Angeles (1997), a hilltop campus of travertine and metal panels, occupied him for more than a decade. He received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1988 and the AIA Gold Medal in 1997. In 2018 he stepped away from his firm after allegations of sexual harassment, and he later retired from practice.