Meier, Richard (1934-…), is an American architect who is famous for his design of geometric buildings. His style draws heavily from the purism of early Modernists, especially Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It includes simple geometric masses, many of them pure white in color.
Richard Alan Meier was born on Oct. 12, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Cornell University in 1957, he worked for several firms in New York City. One of the firms was that of Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian-born architect and furniture designer. In 1963, Meier opened his own firm. He resigned from the firm in 2018, following charges of sexual harassment made against him by several women.
Meier’s first major public building was the Atheneum (1979) in New Harmony, Indiana. It incorporates his mature style of ordered geometric white boxes off-set by a few carefully composed curved elements. Meier received a number of other important commissions for major public buildings around the world, many of them museums. He designed the Museum for the Decorative Arts (1985) in Frankfurt, Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art (1995) in Barcelona, Spain; the Getty Center (1997) in Los Angeles; federal courthouses in Islip, New York, and Phoenix, Arizona (both 2000); a church in Rome called the Dives in Misericordia (2003); and an art museum (2004) in Baden-Baden, Germany. Meier also designed Teachers Village, a complex of schools and apartments in Newark, New Jersey (2015).
