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Meier stuck to his guns, unlike Graves who jumped ship to join Venturi. Unlike the other four of the five Architects with whom he was grouped (and in turn grouped himself in the 1975 book five Architects), Meier never justified his drawing style with the theoretical twists of say, Eisenman, for whom new forms of perspective in architectural drawing would generate new form. This building is geometric, solid and tight as one might expect.
#RICHARD MEIER ARCHITECT PLUS#
Above is the ground public floor – living room, dining room and kitchen plus office etc – and on top, the bedrooms. A long basement (containing the client’s studio, a huge laundry room, an exercise room and a plant room) contains the guts of the house. Though more elongated than Meier’s American houses, the grid still reigns supremeĮven though more elongated than Meier’s American houses, the grid still reigns supreme, both across plan but also across the section. Then a long east-west corridor which creates the spine of the house, and then the more public, whiter parts of the building towards the stunning view from whence one has just arrived. One accesses the building at mid-point through a simple door, and passes immediately through a band of private rooms arranged east to west: recreation room, office and gun room, which are all lined in wood.
#RICHARD MEIER ARCHITECT SERIES#
The interior and exterior are a series of thick bands in terraces across the hill. This layering – recreation, road and house – is picked up inside the main house, which has a particularly narrow plan given what it contains. A bridge leads off it on to the first floor of the house. To the left is a strip of recreation behind white walls: guest house, walled tennis court and, above the huge garage, a swimming pool, which due to the slope, can also be accessed at grade from a wooded ridge above. Or to be more accurate the road widens and then stops, because there are no historical tropes, no archways or gates to denote that one has entered the home there is merely the space itself. The pre-existing driveway winds up the west side of the hill and ends in a large courtyard. Any qualities the Oxfordshire residence shares with that typology are simply down to his being able to stretch out across an east-west plot cut into the top of a hill on the site of a sprawling-yet-mundane 1930s villa which looked like a massively inflated bungalow. Admirably, Meier doesn’t seem to be the remotest bit interested in the history of the English country house. His ostensible loyalty to the design principles and palette of early Modernism has often been at odds with architectural fashion, but never more so than today when, in rural England, tastes and planning culture urge architects towards a certain historicism, particularly in terms of material but also in terms of form. There is something distinctly improbable about Richard Meier completing his first house in the UK at the age of 82. Meier doesn’t seem to be the remotest bit interested in the history of the English country house Today, Richard Meier & Partners Architects has offices in New York and Los Angeles, with projects ranging from China and Tel Aviv to Paris and Hamburg. .continue on Wikipedia. Some of his other notable commissions include museums such as the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art in Spain (1995) and the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills, California (1996) The Hague, The Netherlands City Hall (1995) and San Jose City Hall (2005) commercial buildings such as the reconstruction of City Tower in Prague, Czech Republic (2008) and residential buildings such as 173 and 176 Perry Street in the West Village of Manhattan (2002) and Meier on Rothschild in Tel Aviv, Israel (2015). Meier first gained significant recognition for his designs of various residences, in addition to The Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana (1979) and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia (1983).Īlthough Meier was an acclaimed architect for many years, his design of the Getty Center, a massive museum complex in Los Angeles, California, which opened in 1997, catapulted him into mainstream recognition. Early in his career, Meier worked with artists such as painter Frank Stella and favored structures that were white and geometric. In 1972, he was identified as one of The New York Five, a group of modernist architects: Meier, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, and John Hejduk. In New York City, Meier worked for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill briefly in 1959, and then for Marcel Breuer for three years, prior to starting his own practice in 1963.
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A winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1984, Meier has designed several iconic buildings including the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and San Jose City Hall. Richard Meier (born October 12, 1934) is an American abstract artist and architect, whose geometric designs make prominent use of the color white.
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