![richard meier architect richard meier architect](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cf/70/48/cf70488f99bdf3ed5bcf45b40b3ed1cb.jpg)
He takes recognizable elements from the Purist tradition-and from his own previous work-and combines these forms into a “defamiliarized” synthesis. Meier “accentuat the importance of the interface between the Citrohan and Dom-ino components” 5 by inserting the main circulation route between the two structures.Īll of Meier’s residences can be read as a critical response to Corbusier and certain other modernist sources. The discrete functions of these areas are expressed in closed, cellular forms.
![richard meier architect richard meier architect](https://www.designboom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/meier_02.jpg)
He also reserved the paradigm of Corbusier’s load-bearing Citrohan House (1920–27), with its vertical emphasis, for the private areas (bedrooms) and service areas (the kitchen, bathrooms and storage rooms). Meier transforms the columniated structure of Corbusier’s Dom-ino House project (1914–15) with its insistent horizontality into the double- and triple-height glass pavilions that serve as the public living rooms. This novel juxtaposition derives from Corbusier’s two canonic means of organizing architectonic space. Meier merges two of Corbusier’s residential prototypes with dynamic equilibrium in his Smith, Douglas, and Shamberg residences to emphasize an opposition of public and private realms. Possessing a palatial quality and scale, his houses clearly present supremely structured sequences based on structural differentiations. Joseph Rykwert succinctly sums up Meier as “a maker of objects whose power is in the obsessive elegance of their cut, in their cool though exemplary and somehow didactic detachment from their surroundings.” 4Ī roster of Meier’s residences is an honor roll of formalist achievement. Only when one has penetrated the living room’s glass pavilion is the extraordinary site transparently revealed. There the entry facade and a solid fireplace aligned behind it block the enticing view of nature beyond. Meier continues this juxtaposition of nature with the manmade construct in his starkly white Smith House in Darien, Connecticut (1965–67).
#RICHARD MEIER ARCHITECT WINDOWS#
Corbusier retained the landscape as an element of surprise that expanded in a perspectival view, as in a painting, beyond the windows of his interiors. Corbusier regarded geometry as the “response of reason to nature” 3 and determined that his grandly imposing forms be grounded on Cartesian logic. This sense of disjunction derives in part from Corbusier’s polemic. Meier’s evocative yet extreme isolation of his residences from their context parallels the object status of Frank Stella’s canvases. Meier’s intimate involvement with the modern tradition in painting naturally filtered into his approach to architecture as the conscious creation of environmentally scaled “high art” objects elevated to a maximum of coherent clarity. At that point, Meier’s collages (based on grids incorporating abstracted letters and other found elements) became a side-line engaged in sporadically as pleasurable investigations.Īmong Meier’s earliest executed works in New York, however, were projects having to do with contemporary art, especially the Stella studio and apartment (1965), a loft renovation for William Rubin (1966), and his significant recycling of the Bell Telephone Laboratories into Westbeth artists’ housing (1967–70). Meier consequently abandoned the dual model of Le Corbusier as an equally committed architect and painter. Concerned with the lack of innovative quality in contemporary synagogues, Meier invited Barnett Newman to develop for the exhibition his synagogue project based upon a baseball field, whereupon Newman’s single-minded intensity influenced Meier and convinced him to pursue architecture exclusively. Meier organized the “Recent American Synagogue Architecture” exhibition for the Jewish Museum in 1963. Meier used Stella’s studio, and they submitted a joint entry to Philadelphia’s monumental fountain competition in 1964. He and Frank Stella studied painting with Stephen Greene. Until the early 1960s, Meier complemented his focus on architecture with serious painting and collage-making. The release of Meier’s own documentary book 2 and the recent completion of his most impressive executed work, the Bronx Developmental Center (1970–77), mark this as a fitting time for sensible consideration of his achievement over the last decade. His darkened labyrinth entitled Metamorphosis, at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s inaugural show, 1 functioned as a compelling giant anagram game of literary conception: letters aligned in endless permutations to form flexible walls and ceilings of words. At Cooper Union his white architectural models (of constructed as well as unrealized projects) engaged in a coherent dialogue. RICHARD MEIER CAUGHT THE ATTENTION of the art world once more by reappearing on the museum scene with two intriguing installations last winter.