American architect and teacher. He received his architectural education at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (BArch 1957), and then worked in New York with Davis, Brody and Wisniewski (1958–9), Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (1959–60) and Marcel Breuer and Associates (1960–63). In 1963 he established his own office in New York and began a long teaching career at Cooper Union, New York (1963–73), and several other American universities including Princeton, NJ, Yale, New Haven, CT, and Harvard, Cambridge, MA. Meier’s work was dominated by explorations of the modernist theme of counterpointing space, form and structure, with particularly strong references to Le Corbusier’s designs of the 1920s and 1930s. He first attracted critical attention with distinctive designs for private houses such as the Jerome Meier House (1963–5), Essex Falls, NJ; the Dotson House (1964–6), Ithaca; the Smith House (1965–7), Darien, CT; the Saltzman House (1967–9), East Hampton, NY; the Maidman House (1971–6), Sands Point, NY; and the Douglas House (1971–3), Harbor Springs, MI.
In these houses Meier stressed the artificial and abstract characteristics of architecture. His buildings, while designed in relation to their natural settings, are pristine structures that stand in contrast to nature. Spaces are defined and penetrated by horizontal and vertical planes, clearly emphasized by intensity of surface treatment such as white tiled walls and wood flooring; there is also a domination of the vertical dimension of space over the horizontal. For example, the Douglas House , built on a steep, heavily wooded hillside above a river, stands out among the trees as a geometric white box composed of horizontal and vertical elements and windows, dominated by a pair of tall, elongated chimney stacks.
Meier was a member of the New york five, a group of architects whose work, representing a return to the formalism of early modern rationalist architecture, was exhibited at MOMA in 1969. It was a loose association that disintegrated in due course as members of the group later pursued different formal directions. In contrast to Michael Graves’s adoption of painterly solutions to architectural problems, Meier, who was the most prolific builder of the group, continued the constructional approach that has its origins in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and De Stijl and was later transformed by the plastic expressions of Le Corbusier and Aalto.
The rapid development of Meier’s reputation led to larger commissions including the Athenaeum (1975–9), New Harmony, IN; the Hartford Seminary (1978–81), Hartford, CT; the Museum für Kunsthandwerk (1979–85), Frankfurt am Main; the High Museum of Art (1980–83), Atlanta, GA (for illustration see Atlanta); and the J. Paul Getty Arts Center, Brentwood, CA, begun in 1985 (due for completion in 1997). In these buildings, as well as in the houses, he clearly articulated public and private zones in an attempt to clarify and redefine a sense of order, and this articulation is expressed again in the structure. For example, the High Museum of Art is a complex composition of structural forms, cylindrical and rectilinear, with the entrance and public areas defined by large expanses of windows while the gallery walls are solid, white surfaces. The relationships of solid and void are emphasized by the whiteness and by the play of sunlight and shadow on the interlocking geometric volumes. In the uncertain climate of American Post-modernism, Meier’s buildings exhibited a strong continuity of the formal concerns of modernism. His approach centred upon a dialogue between spatial configurations and structure, and he achieved a freedom of relationships that expressed the modernist reconstruction of architectural space and form. This offered a modern experience rather than a collage of historical references. Meier’s work was widely exhibited in the USA and Europe, and he received several awards for his work including the prestigious Pritzker Prize (1984).
Malcolm Quantrill
From Grove Art Online
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