In celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Richard Meier’s architecture career, Richard Meier & Partners Architects, in collaboration with the Fondazione Bisazza from Italy, are presenting the first Richard Meier Retrospective in Europe, titled 'Richard Meier - Architecture and Design'. Taking place May 8-July 28, the new exhibition will be a retrospective of the American architect’s iconic work and the unveiling of a site-specific installation for the Foundation’s permanent collection. Meier’s oeuvre is a reflection of the continuous search and analysis of concepts perfected over more than half a century of constant work in the field of architecture and design. More images and information on the exhibition after the break.
The absence of color is an intrinsic characteristic of his works; his philosophy is grounded in using light as the main material to give form to his orderly, sculptural, and linear architecture. Profoundly influenced by Le Corbusier, Richard Meier refines his principles of geometrical progression by playing with structure, space and elements of formal precision. “The way that light traverses and cuts through buildings is the interrogative and the principal magic from whence Richard Meier’s projects are born,” states Frank Stella.
In 1984, Mr. Meier was awarded the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, considered the field’s highest honor and he has been the youngest individual architect ever to be awarded this honor. Meier has since received numerous awards and international recognition including the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects from the (1989), AIA Gold Medal (1997), the Praemium Imperiale from the Japanese government in recognition of lifetime achievement in the Arts (1997), and the Gold Medal for Architecture (2008) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1992, the French Government honored him as a Commander of Arts and Letters, and in 1995 he was elected Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2011 Richard Meier received the AIANY President’s Award and the Sidney Strauss Award from the New York Society of Architects. A leader in the field, Meier has also received honorary degrees from the University of Naples, New Jersey Institute of Technology, The New School for Social Research, Pratt Institute, the University of Bucharest, and North Carolina State University.
Fondazione Bisazza pays tribute to this great architect through a representative selection of his most influential works: fifteen models, more than thirty technical drawings, forty photographs and preliminary sketches and for the first time in Italy some lesser known design objects such as a tableware collection designed for Reed & Barton in collaboration with Swid Powell.
From the Getty Center in Los Angeles, which was begun in 1984 and completed in 1997, to the Neugebauer House in Naples, Florida; from the High Museum in Atlanta to the project for the competition to build the World Trade Center Memorial in New York, and the Arp Museum project in Rolandseck, Germany, which traverses a mountain, the works of the American architect are recognizable geometrical and spatial compositions. The Richard Meier. Architecture and Design exhibition also features some of his most famous creations in Italy: the Ara Pacis museum complex in Rome and The Jubilee Church in Tor Tre Teste completed to mark the occasion of the Jubilee in 2000.
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