Richard Meier’s Time-Space, Place-Form and Color-Light (Past and New Reflections on the Starchitect’s Getty Centre and Selected Major Works until 2000)

Abstract

The focus of this article is in the reflection on some important architectural concepts that seem to ‘color’ Richard Meier’s work: Time, Space, Place, Form, Color and Light. On the other hand, this is not a philosophical discourse, a theoretical treatise, nor it is a chronological paper about Richard Meier’s work, but rather an aesthetic reflection and a conceptual query. In order to achieve this, the article will nonetheless use as the leitmotif of this paper, as the author believes, some of Meier's major architectural achievements, but focusing a bit more on five of his masterpieces from three decades–The Atheneum, Indiana New Harmony; Hartford Seminary, Connecticut; Museum for Decorative Arts, Frankfurt; The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia and The J Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. The author of this paper, while giving a very personal view and at times a non–critical distance (not adulation) from Meier’s works, strongly believes that Richard Meier has left such an impact, and opened a new path for the future of architecture, like no other architect has done in the last three decades. Philip Jodidio remarks that ‘in a period of rapidly changing architectural styles, the name of Richard Meier stands apart. His unwavering exploration of a well–defined geometric vocabulary has proven that modern architecture can at the same time be respectful of the past and conscious of the present’.