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כנסי עבר // Speakers // 1998: Megaform as Urban Landscape

21 - 23 June 1998

Richard Meier

Graduating from Cornell University in 1958, Richard Meier worked for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and Marcel Breuer before starting his own practice in 1963. While he first gained renown for his pristine, white, Neo-Corbusian houses, by the mid-1970s Meier started to receive larger commissions, including two extensive housing schemes, a school and the Bronx Developmental Center, a large therapeutic facility in New York (1970-76). The realization of The Athenaeum in New Harmony, Indiana in 1979 established his reputation as a designer of cultural institutions and this led in succession to the Museum for Decorative Arts in Frankfurt (1979-84) and the High Museum in Atlanta (1980-83), and, somewhat later, to the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (1987-95). His ultimate achievement in this particular field has been the Getty Center in Los Angeles that opened in 1997 after some thirteen years of design and development. Meier's City Hall and Library in The Hague (1986-95) is unquestionably his most significant urban work to date. Conceived as a twelve-storey megastructural office building about an internal galleria, it serves as a "city-in-miniature" mediating between the original low-rise fabric of The Hague and the office buildings that have been rather randomly superimposed upon its form during the last decade. In addition to the 1984 Pritzker Prize, Meier was the recipient, in 1997, of both the AIA Gold Medal and the Japanese Praemium Imperiale.

Richard Meier

The Getty Center, Los Angeles, California, USA
Photo: Tim Street-Porter