Running time: 24 minutes
Richard Meier received his architectural education at Cornell University, New York. Between 1957 and 1963 he worked for F. Grad, Davis Brody & Wisniewsky, SOM and Marcel Breuer; then started his own practice in New York. He has taught in many American schools of architecture and at the American Academy in Rome; he has been the author or subject of several books and innumerable articles; his work has been included in a great many exhibitions; and he has received innumerable awards including, in 1984, the Pritzker Prize.
In his talk, Meier confesses to being irritated if he is referred to as a Post-Modernist, as he cannot believe that the great promise and richness of some of the formal tenets of Modernism are exhausted - the technological advances, the free plan, the free façade, the separation of skin and structure, all that fostered a new kind of volumetric exploration and held many more possibilities.
Meier's own work is a preoccupation with space, neither abstract nor scaleless, but space, whose order and definition are related to life, to human scale and to the culture of architecture. He works with volume and surface and manipulates form in light, changes of scale and view, movement and status. His goal is presence, not illusion. Many of his sources are from architectural history but his quotes and allusions are never literal. His buildings are conceived in a complementary relationship to their natural setting. His search for clarity begins with the plan.
You may also be interested to hear Meier discuss his first church project in Jubilee Church.
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