RICHARD MEIER: THE LEADER OF THE NEW YORK FIVE

Richard Meier embarked on his architecture career in 1963, with a house for his parents in New Jersey.  Since then, he has completed a multitude of incredible private homes and buildings, public sites and temples all over the world. Meier’s buildings are often in an open setting, allowing for the integration of the architecture with the natural surroundings. In Meier’s view, Man will never succeed in equaling nature, and so should not seek to imitate it. Rather the contrast between nature and architecture actually enables us to experience nature with more intensity.

Meier’s designs utilize geometrical shapes, a frequent use of footbridges and his characteristic facade of white metal panels. He has also used a lot of glass, making buildings very light and the surroundings highly visible.

To this very day Meier has remained true to the New York Five’s (five top architects who wrote a definitive book on architecture, Meier included) nickname, ‘The Whites’. White for him is one of the ways to achieve a powerful, clear form: “It is the color which, in natural light, reflects and intensifies the perception of all of the shades of the rainbow, the colors which are constantly changing in nature, for the whiteness of white is never just white; it is almost always transformed by light and that which is changing: the sky, the clouds, the sun and the moon.”

Meier’s structures are dreamlike in appearance.  Looking at a Richard Meier designed beach house in Malibu, CA, it is nearly impossible not to think “I’d rather live in that house than any other house in the world.”   His use of white to exemplify the surroundings and the people inhabiting the space look like a constantly evolving photograph.  Richard Meier is one of the key examples of an artist who creates a setting for the KUSH lifestyle.  After seeing pictures of The Meier on Rothschild, a new apartment tower he has designed in Tel Aviv, Israel, we’re ready to open a TKC office in the Middle East just so we have an excuse to live in a Richard Meier creation!

Below are some of The KUSH Collection’s favorite Meier masterpieces, ranging from private beach houses to his design proposal to rebuild the World Trade Center with a free space to honor the perished.

Read more about Meier here: http://www.arcspace.com/architects/meier/meier_nai/index.html

Meier’s website: http://www.richardmeier.com/www/