• 건축공간론

Dr Dongkuk Chang

Richard Meier

Centre for the Design of Architectural Space Structure

• Richard Meier

1934 Born in New Jersey, USA

1957 Graduates from Cornell University

1960-63 Worked in the office of Marcel Breuer

1963- Establishing private practice in New York City

(Now Richard Meier & Partners, Architects)

Important works

1965-67 Smith House, Darien, Connecticut

1979-85 Museum for Decorative Arts, Frankfurt

1980-83 High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia

1987-95 Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain

1985-97 The Getty Center, Los Angeles, California

1996- Church of the Year 2000, Rome, Italy

Richard Meier & Partners

475 Tenth Avenue, New York, New York 10018, United States

Tel: +1 212 967 6060 Fax: +1 212 967 3207

Email: rmp@richardmeier.com

Web: www.richardmeier.com

• Architectural philosophy

By Richard Meier

• ‘The architectural philosophy I just sketched out for you is not something

identical to Mies; in its sense of continuity perhaps you might say that it is

analogous to Mies.

•My rules or vocabulary is based upon the belief that architecture is an art of

substance. It is the materialization of ideas about space.

•Given the demands of program, site, local and building technology, the

architect endeavors to make buildings communicate in the language of

materials and textures.

•Architecture is for the contemplation of the eyes and the mind, but no less

importantly, it is to be experienced and savored by all the human senses, and

synthesized by the mind.’

• The New Moderns

• In the early 1970s the critics lined up confidently to predict the imminent

demise of Modernism, united under the banner ‘Modern Architecture is Dead’ or

‘MAID’. News of its death proved to be premature, however, and there remains

today a growing band of architects whose stylistic and formal loyalties link them

with the modernist mainstream of the early century.

• The undoubted leader of this group is Richard Meier, whose characteristic all-

white architecture suggests his position as the ‘pope’ in the New Moderns’

broad church.

• Meier first emerged on the international scene with the publication in 1966 of

the book ‘Five Architects’, which presented the work of five New York architects:

Richard Meier, John Hejduk, Charles Gwathmey, Peter Eisenman and Michael

Graves.

• Consistency in Style

• Although hardly a ‘group’ as such, they were distinguished by their loyalty to

the ‘white’ architecture of Le Corbusier and their adherence to the compositional

‘five points’ that he identified.

• Le Corbusier’s five points, of a grid, a free plan, a free façade, strip windows,

and roof garden, can be regarded almost as a short-hand notation for

Modernism, a check list of the professed advantages provided by using post

rather than pre-industrial materials.

• Meier has remained remarkably consistent in his commitment to the Corbusian

version of Modernism. His Getty Center in Los Angeles, 1984-97, which many

see as the apotheosis of his career, marks three decades of using the same

approach, albeit somewhat deflected in Los Angles by the impact of scale.

• Consistency in Style

By Richard Rogers

• ‘No other architect in the twentieth century has so profoundly understood,

reinterpreted, and extended the canonical language of Le Corbusier.

• Corb’s ability to carve architecture out of solid mass has been artfully

assimilated with the analytical intelligence of Walter Groupius and the detailing

and formal planning of Mies van der Rohe, creating new forms and meanings of

unique rigor and intensity.

• It is in this respect that Richard Meier is both classical and ultra-modernist.

• The plan always generates the form. The section generates movement and

scale. You can “read” a Meier façade simply by reading the plan and section.

The apparent simplicity belies a rigorous intellectual reduction of the program

into its constituent elements.’

• Projects

1965-67 Smith House,

Darien, Connecticut

1991-1995 Swissair North

American Headquarters,

Melville, New York

1996- Church of the Year

2000, Rome, Italy

• Projects

1986-1993 Exhibition & Assembly

Building Ulm, Germany

1985-97 The Getty Center, Los Angeles

1979-85 Museum for

Decorative Arts, Frankfrut

1987-95 Museum of Contemporary

Art, Barcelona, Spain

1980-83 High Museum of

Art, Atlanta, Georgia

• Smith House Site Map

Richard Meier, who has, perhaps, applied the five

points more effectively than any of the other advocates

in ‘Five Architects’, began his independent career with

the Smith House, 1967, in Connecticut.

• Smith House

• Smith House

‘In every house there is a search for clarity, which in my

architecture is a call for basic geometric form. This geometry

helps to create certain areas of compression, energizing

tensions between openness and closure, between solid and

void, between opacity and transparency.’ By Richard Meier

‘Richard Meier’s houses are white, Spartan, hard-edged,

carved, interlocking cubes. Ocassionally the pure volume is

pierced by inclined ramps, steel stairs, protruding chimneys,

and deep vertical furrows. Space flows continuously in three

dimensions. Cantilevered mezzanines, fully glazed, double- or

triple-height spaces emphasize verticality. Cellular rooms and

enclosed spaces stretched along linear galleries emphasize

horizontality. Sinuous, free-flowing forms weave in and out of

the taut, highly engineered exterior skin of the canonical

volume. These perfect forms are in stark contrast to their

natural surroundings. Yet they work in harmony against nature,

rather than transforming nature.’ By Richard Rogers

• Smith House

This (ramp) is a device reverentially appropriated by Meier

from Le Corbusier’s work as an elegant way of visually

unraveling space; a magic carpet that allows participants to

gaze up as they move through the building, rather than casting

their eyes down as they watch their footsteps on the stairs.

Meier frequently uses ramps to unite the succession of spaces

in his buildings. They are not just functional elements, but

also serve as didactic devices, showing the visitor how the

various spatial elements of the building fit together.

• Smith House

• Smith House

• Smith House

• Smith House

• The Getty Centre

Site Map

Looking north along San Diego Freeway, Getty Center circled

Axis

Entry floor plan

Panorama looking southwest to northwest, to the Pacific Ocean, the Getty Center, and

the Santa Monica Mountains, from Bel Air

Panorama looking north to northeast, to the Research Institute, Museum, and

south promontory

West side of Museum,exhibition

pavilion andoutdoor cafe at right

northwest corner of Museum

Stainless steel clamps attaching travertine panels to concrete

wall, covered with weather protective black

Travertine: feather fossil at right of same feature stone, architect's favorite

Water: stepped watercourse beside grand stairway

Tramway: trams passing on straight, double-width section

Looking northeast to Auditorium

loggia outside Cafeteria

west terrace beside Cafeteria

Museum

Museum: looking southeast to Museum and Getty Center

Museum courtyard

main entrance rotunda, with sliding walls open to Museum courtyard

Research Institute; looking northwest into library court

South promontory from the Museum

South promontory

http://web.reed.edu/academic/departments/art/getty

Church of the Year 2000

Designed in Meier’s trademark white like a series of sails, the three

curved walls of the church, symbolizing the Holy Trinity, admit ample

light.

Light is also a constant factor in

the architecture of Richard

Meier, and as applied to a

religious context it naturally

assumes a symbolic power and

significance.

• References

• James Steele, Architecture today, Phaidon, 1997

• Paul Goldberger, Richard Meier Houses, Rizzoli, 1996

• GA, GA Document Extra 08: Richard Meier, GA, 1997

• http://web.reed.edu/academic/departments/art/getty