Category Archives: Architecture

Cool new book by Stanley Greenberg: Codex

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I have in my hands an interesting new book by the photographer Stanley Greenberg, Codex New York: Typologies of The City. In it, Greenberg goes around and takes pictures of largely less-examined parts of Manhattan. What we are really seeing is how Greenberg classifies and slices and dices these spaces in his mind. He separates them into “Alleys,” “Bridge/Tunnel/Track,” “Buttresses,” “Cemeteries,” “Construction,” “Gas/Electric,” “Geology/Topography,’ “Grid/Non-Grid,” “Little Streets,” “Parking Lots,”  “Parking Sheds,” “Playgrounds,” “Relics,” “Sanitation,” “Skybridges,” “Vacant Spaces,” “Wastewater Treatment,” “Water Supply,” and “Waterfront.”

My reaction to the book is a good example of how information shapes seeing. I didn’t like or understand the book, until I read the Table of Contents and saw how Greenberg has separated the photographs into these sections. Once armed mentally with the classification system, it all became very interesting, and amusing. Who would ever think of noticing and photographing Parking Sheds. “Buttresses” was one of my favorite sections. It turns out there are numerous buildings supported by steel buttresses, in an ad hoc way, to keep them from falling down. I had not noticed that. So it’s a good book. The introductory Essay by Karrie Jacobs is also nice. As usual, she is readable and insightful. She argues that we are all staring at our screens more, and the city around us less. I don’t quite buy the argument that this somehow lets the city change in unexpected or unwanted ways, but it’s an interesting theory. Oh yeah: the word “Palimpsest” does not occur in the book, as far as I noted. But it could.

Infrastructure as Architecture

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I’ve started teaching a class on infrastructure at the architecture school at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. See here for more info: NJIT Architecture School The two courses I teach, Elements of Infrastructure and History of Infrastructure, are a perfect fit for me. For whatever reason, I’ve gradually become obsessed with the pipes, rails, tubes and other stuff that lie generally beneath our feet. Everyone has got to believe in something; I believe in infrastructure.

Increasingly, the country is too. It and its new leader, President Barack Obama, are turning to infrastructure as the key to lifting ourselves out of bad times and paving the way for future ones. Might work. Here’s a recent column of mine on the subject. Infrastructure column.

Cold City of Fargo Now Cool

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Coolness, as every high schooler knows, is one of those things that’s hard to define but easy to spot among one’s peers.

With cities, being cool depends in part on being economically robust and vibrant, but also on other qualities, such as having a vibrant art scene, good restaurants and interesting local music.

For various reasons, these days almost any city can become a cool city, converting itself from has been to hipness in a relative blink of the eye. It has something to do with the Internet economy, which has a hop, skip and a jump quality about it, alighting in strange places for hard to predict reasons.

I was in Fargo, ND recently, giving a talk on What is Design to the architectural department of North Dakota State University, and it seems to me that this small city is one of those places that has suddenly become “cool.”

Fargo, as most people know, is known to outsiders principally for giving title to the movie by the Coen brothers about murder and Scandinavian accents and very cold weather. Fargo, to the extent that it stood for anything in that movie, stood for cold and dreary white people sitting in bars with not much to do.

I found some of that in Fargo, which to me was a nice break from New York. But I also found little restaurants, a very chic “boutique-style” hotel, and smart people doing interesting work. Most of this came through the eyes of architecture students and professors, who impressed me with the solidness and creativity. Fargo, I could see, could be a pretty good place to live, even though it does get to be 20 below zero in the Winter. (Which global warming has eased, the locals tell me: it used to be 30 below zero.)

Why has this city on the plains ascended the ladder of coolness? Some luck, some planning. Located at the intersection of freight and river lines, the city has always been a hub of manufacturing and industry, some of which is still there. The city was founded around the railroad lines in the late 19th century.

Some of the city’s coolness rests on a local boy making good, a certain Douglas Burgum who was the owner of Great Plains Software – until Microsoft purchased it for $1.1 billion in 2001. Now a top executive at the Redmond company, Burgam is still located in Fargo – and he and his ex-wife Karen Burgum has put money into a number of interesting projects. Just to name two, his wife started the boutique Hotel Donaldson, where I stayed very comfortable, while Mr. Burgum gave the architecture school the money to renovate the old warehouse that is its new downtown center. www.ndsu.nodak.edu/arch/

Of course, it’s not all Burgum money that’s making Fargo. And I’m just giving you my quick impressions after a quick speaking trip. Still, when I’ve gone to cities that are experiencing a comeback, it’s sobering how often I get the impression that private money plays a major part in their resurgence. That’s the case in Chattanooga, where a lot of old Coca-Cola, New York Times and other money has played a part in the city’s betterment. www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.phpIn this country, with government less active than in Western Europe, it’s often left up to private people – rich ones – to carry out what is in effect urban policy and design.

Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities

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My latest book, “Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities,” was published in late 2006 by Carroll and Graf Publishers. Here’s some basic information on it below, and you can find more on Amazon.

Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities By Alex Marshall
ISBN 0-7867-1864-1 EAN 978-0-7867-1864-1
$29.95 Trade Paper
240pp, 8 1/2 x 11 Carton Qty: 20
Art & Architecture/ Urban & Land Use Planning
ARC010000 Fall 2006 Rights: W Carroll & Graf

Description:
“The pulse of great cities may be most palpable above ground, but it is below the busy streets where we can observe their rich archaeological history and the infrastructure that keeps them running. In The Secret Lives of Cities journalist Alex Marshall investigates how geological features, archaeological remnants of past civilizations, and layered networks transporting water, electricity, and people, have shaped these cities through centuries of political turbulence and advancements in engineering — and how they are determining the course of the cities’ future. From the first-century catacombs of Rome, the New York subway system, and the swamps and ancient quays beneath London, to San Francisco’s fault lines, the depleted aquifer below Mexico City, and Mao Tse-tung’s extensive network of secret tunnels under Beijing, these subterranean environments offer a unique cross-section of a city’s history and future. Stunningly illustrated with colorful photographs, drawings, and maps, The Secret Lives of Cities reveals the hidden worlds beneath our feet, and charts the cities’ development through centuries of forgotten history, political change, and technological innovation.” You can browse or buy it on Amazon.com.

A New City Rises From Berlin’s No-Man’s Land

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By Alex Marshall and Sally Young
Globe Correspondents
11/5/2000

BERLIN – The guard tower and wooden sign over the street warning ”You Are Now Leaving The American Sector!” were still there, as was the narrow bridge over a ravine, where prisoners, dissidents, and spies were exchanged. But beyond these carefully preserved memorials to another time and era, it was difficult to distinguish the famous Checkpoint Charlie from any other intersection in this bustling city. Now, what was once a bleak no-man’s land has been recarved into streets and blocks. And on these streets, new buildings have risen up, many of them designed by the best, or at least the most famous, architects on the planet. Within a two-block radius of Checkpoint Charlie, Aldo Rossi, Philip Johnson, Rem Koolhaas, and Peter Eisenman have all tried their hand. Widen that circle further, and you encounter buildings by Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Rafael Moneo, and Richard Rogers. We had traveled to the new Berlin to see this new city being remade, the choices its leaders faced, the ones they made correctly, the ones that might be regretted in future years. We were the Loeb Fellowship, all 13 of us, from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

For a week we examined this city from the inside out, often with personal tours by top planners and architects. We saw a new city coming out of the ground, spurred on by the torrents of money, both public and private, rushing in to fill the blank spaces now that the dikes of communism and the Cold War have been broken and breached. For a traveler, Berlin is a great place to spend a weekend or a week, particularly if you like contemporary architecture. But it’s also a great place to eat spicy German sausage from street vendors, drink great beer, shop for high fashion, and people watch.

What’s more, with the dollar at an all-time high, it’s surprisingly affordable. Eating at a nice restaurant, staying in a hotel, is much less expensive than in Boston or New York. How to get across the reality of the New Berlin? It’s as if 50 blocks of mid-town Manhattan had been forcibly cleared, and left vacant for 50 years. Then one day, development rushed back in. Signs still remain of this city’s remarkably violent past. Walk in almost any older section of the city, past the domed Reichstag or on the elegant Friedrichstrasse, for example, and you’ll see pockmarks, dents, and chips, left over from the bullets and shrapnel that shattered this city.

They are evidence of when a mustachioed-man in this city started, and then lost, a war that consumed more lives than any other in history. It left this city destroyed, and divided. It is finally reuniting, physically, culturally, politically, and socially. Even so, divisions remain. A local architect told us that few West Berliners would go to a restaurant in East Berlin, and vice versa. West Germans, raised under a capitalist democracy, say East Germans are lazy. East Germans, raised under communism and now suffering high unemployment, say they are treated like second-class citizens. But these divisions should blur as this city takes on its new role not only as the political capital of a united Germany, but as one of the commercial and cultural capitals of the European Union.

A wonderful place to begin a tour is a gentle cruise down the river that bisects the city. You can take in the highlights of the city in just an hour or two. Do it on the first day you arrive, while you are still jet-lagged. It’s a nice, undemanding activity. There are several boat companies and itineraries. A good one leaves from the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures), conveniently located in the city’s central park, the Tiergarten, on John Foster Dulles Alle 10. The Number 100 bus stops there. This Number 100 bus, a double-decker, is another easy way to see the city. A regular city bus, it winds through the Tiergarten, around the Brandenburg Gate, and down to Alexanderplatz in the heart of East Berlin. Alexanderplatz, a stark modernist plaza reminiscent of Boston’s City Hall plaza, once had banners draped from its surrounding tall apartment towers proclaiming the triumph of socialism. Now, neon signs for Sony and other multinationals adorn them.

At Alexanderplatz, you can take an elevator to the top of the ornate radio tower, the Berliner Fernsehturnc, visible throughout the city. It gives you a 360-degree view of Berlin and its environs. After you take in the view, buy the brochure, Berlin: A Panoraminc View, at the Ferneshturm gift shop. It is a great guide to what to see when you are back on the ground.

In general when traveling throughout the city, be sure to use the great public transport system. It is a four-part system: the S-Bahn (Bahn means train) or aboveground trains are great for sightseeing, the U-Bahn or underground trains, the yellow local trams that are only in the former East Berlin, and the buses. You can buy passes good for a day, several days, or a week. The system is extensive.

Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic for The New York Times, recently observed that the nation’s largest city lacks much ambitious contemporary architecture. The same holds true for every American city, including Boston. It’s hard to realize how true this is, until one sees the shapes, colors, and materials used in Berlin. And they are used not just for fancy museums, as is the case here, but for offices, apartments, embassies, public buildings, and department stores. Pretty much any place is a good place to start. Directly across from our hotel, the Savoy, for example, was the Ludwig-Erhard-Haus, the home of the Berlin Stock Exchange. This dramatic building, designed by British architect Nicholas Grimshaw, has floors that are not erected, but suspended from two giant steel arches. But there are some architectural must-sees, including the areas around Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, and Potzdamer Platz. All three are places of enormous new construction. The Brandenburg Gate is the giant ceremonial arch, similar to Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe in Paris. During the Cold War, it stood naked, stripped of its urban context. With the reunification, the city has reconstructed the elegant Pariser Platz that fronts on the Gate. Being rebuilt on and around this classic public square are the American Embassy, the Hotel Adlon, the Academy of Arts and other buildings. To accommodate the American Embassy’s security concerns, the city had to alter its setback rules.

Frank Gehry, currently the country’s, and perhaps the world’s, most famous architect, designed the DG Bank on the square. From the outside, it meets the city’s design guidelines that new buildings have stone facades, rows of exterior windows, and height and massing similar to the historic buildings that once occupied the square. But inside, Gehry has stuffed the building with an amoeba-like auditorium, that is vaguely like a fish, covered with steel and glass. It is a definitively weird structure. It’s as if a glass and chrome tumor erupted in the middle of a bank’s grand lobby. A beautiful tumor.

The Potzdamer Platz, until destroyed in World War II, was a Parisian-style meeting of six major boulevards in a star-shaped intersection. After the war, it stood vacant for 45 years, a monument to cold-war tensions. Today, it is being built anew. Mostly finished now are the huge agglomerations built by Sony and DaimlerChrysler. Architecturally, these complexes are stunning. The Sony complex by Chicago-based architect Helmut Jahn features a double glass wall building that merges into a huge plaza under a high-tech canopy. The Daimler complex includes a brick-clad skyscraper, a shopping mall, the Daimler headquarters, apartments, general offices, an IMAX cinema, a Broadway-style theater, a hotel and other functions. In all, the Daimler complex, whose master plan was by Renzo Piano, takes up 19 blocks, with buildings by Piano, Rafael Moneo, and Sir Richard Rogers. The diversity of the materials and shapes is stunning. But the overall feel is corporate, bland and controlled.

The two corporations own and maintain many of the ostensibly public streets and spaces. At the Sony Center’s central plaza, we asked our guide what would happen if one of us passed out political leaflets for, say, a local city council race. We would carry you out, came the quick reply from a security guard at the guide’s elbow. This somewhat Orwellian interchange indicated the degree of control exercised over these public spaces. One public architect associated with the projects called them a high level of failure.

As part of the Potsdamer Platz reconstruction, the state is building a new regional railway station at the Platz, all underground, where three types of rail service, basically local, regional, and national and international, will meet on three levels. Its gleaming structures, which we saw under construction, were a testimony to German planning and design.

For any architecture lover in Berlin, an indispensable guide book is ”Berlin: Open City, The City as an Exhibit,” available in English and German in most bookstores and news kiosks. Its skinny, blue covers are stuffed with information, including maps and architectural details on every major building.

Of course, one can look at architecture while strolling, shopping, and eating, all of which can be done aplenty in Berlin. You can check out the fancy shops on the grand boulevard Friedrichstrasse, the gardens and fancy shops around Savignyplatz in West Berlin, or the Soho-like charm, galleries, and fancy shops of Hackescher Market.

Savignyplatz is a small park through which pass many of the central streets of West Berlin’s downtown. Some of the fanciest shops in the city are here. Eating is good too. The Paris Bar (on Kanstrasse between Fasanenstrasse and Uhlandstrasse) is a famous Berlin institution that has been in existence for about 40 years. The owner is a serious art collector and the place is filled with art, much of it from the regular patrons. This is a good place for people watching.

Be sure to check out Depot at Bleibtreustrasse 48 for cosmopolitan European home and garden furnishings. Mechtild Stange, the proprietor, has a well-trained eye for good design, and the prices are affordable. Also check out Art and Industry, at Bleibtreustrasse 40, which specializes in furnishings, jewelry, and pottery from the ’50s.

Another favored haunt is Literaturcafe on Fasanenstrasse just off Kurfurstendam next door to the Kathe Kollwitz Museum. The spacious garden is a perfect spot to spend an afternoon reading or sketching. There is a good bookstore below the cafe, and there are frequent book and poetry readings in the cafe.

Under communism, the Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin was a shadow of its former self as the premier shopping street of the city. Now, rundown buildings are being renovated and new ones built. The new ones include an almost block-long Galeries Lafayette, the French Department store. This grand center is worth seeing as much for its architecture as its superior shopping. It features a hollow-glass core, shaped like two ice-cream cones placed mouth to mouth, around which one can stand and peer into the building’s multiple floors.

Hachescher Markt, just over the river from the Friedrichstrasse, has more old stone buildings that have yet to be renovated. This district of narrow streets and crumbling buildings has a Soho-like flavor, with its mixture of galleries, shops, and restaurants.

A bit further out is the Kathe Kollwitz Platz in Prenzlauerberg, a classic European square with mixed low-rise residential buildings, restaurants and bistros with outdoor cafes, galleries, and antique shops. Fewer tourists have discovered this area, so you can feel smug about having done so. This is an in place for students, and is on the S-Bahn.

Although strolling is nice, pedaling is great too. Bicycling is a wonderful way to see Berlin, and the inhabitants do it a lot. You can rent bikes behind the Zoogarten Station at the entrance to the Tiergarten and bike around this lovely central park with a stop at the biergarten at the Neuer See (Lichtensteinalle).

Eating is perhaps the purest expression of German culture, and one of the most intimidating to outsiders. At lunch one day, we watched as one of the more adventuresome of our group was served an enormous pink football of what appeared to be pure fat. But she sliced into it, peeled back the inch-thick layer of fat – and revealed a glistening center of moist roast pork. Ahhh, German food at its best. Course, meaty, and intimidating. This dish was called Schinken-Eisben. It was the butt of a pig, shrouded in its own fat, and cooked with sauerkraut and potatoes. It was being eaten at the Wirthaus Moorlake (Moorlakeweg 1, tel. 805-58-09), a lovely old timber-framed lodge overlooking a peaceful lagoon. It is a few miles outside Berlin, in a major public park well off the tourist track, but actually accessible by bus.

If you aren’t ready for Schinken-Eisben, eat some wurst at the glorified hotdog stands that abound on the street. The vendors serve their sausages not on a roll, but cut up with toothpicks on a paper plate, with just a smidgen of bread on the side.

If one is not into German food, though, you can do as Germans do, and eat Italian, Asian, or French food. There is plenty of it. Germany is more like America, in this regard, in that many natives disdain their own cuisine and reach for those of other countries.

What else can be said about this lovely city? That it’s still inventing itself. In another decade, the giant cranes that fill much of the skyline will be gone. The residents will settle into using their new train lines, parks, and buildings. And the world will see in what fashion this city resumes its place as one of Europe’s great capital cities.

Alex Marshall is a freelance journalist and author of ”How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken.” Sally Young is the coordinator of Harvard’s Loeb Fellowship at the Graduate School of Design. This story ran on page M1 of the Boston Globe on 11/5/2000. Copyright 2000

The above is a story that ran on the front of the Travel Section in today’s (Sunday) Boston Globe. My friend Sally and I wrote it, based around our trip there last May.

Wolfe’s Strange Tale of Architecture

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In a war of words, the best wielder of them tends to win. So I’m hesitant to disagree with Tom Wolfe, one of the century’s best journalists and a great word wielder. Nevertheless, it bears saying that Wolfe’s entertaining and lengthy two-part screed in The New York Times on Sunday and Monday was largely rubbish. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/opinion/12W OLF.html and http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/opinion/13W OLF.html ).

It’s not that I mind Wolfe’s defense of the diminutive, Edward Durell Stone-designed Huntington Hartford building at Columbus Circle, which the newly renamed Museum of Arts and Design proposes to substantially remodel into its home. It’s true I have never liked this building.

Being windowless, it looked like an unfriendly fortress to me. Wolfe’s piece caused me to see it differently. Perhaps it is worth saving.

What I reject in Wolfe’s tale is his meandering history of 20th century architecture, in which he encapsulates his defense of the Stone building.

Wolfe’s rhetoric and logic are as tortured as that of the architectural theorists he decries. Modernist architecture, whether you like it or not, was largely about fully using new technology, such as steelframe construction, in more and better ways, rather than blindly imitating past architectural styles.

Wolfe’s narrative about architects seeking to hide buildings from ‘the dominant regime’ and seeking to avoid bourgeois materials such as marble is simply not that true. Sure, a few theorists might have spouted off such talk, but such motivations were hardly the major thrust behind modernism, much less the architectural styles that followed.

What people like in architecture is notoriously personal and unpredictable. I myself am no fan of the 1950s-era glass and concrete box, preferring the more curvy buildings that new computer technology make possible. Whatever one’s taste, new times and new technology provide the means for new architecture, and by and large, this is a plus, not a minus.

–Alex Marshall

The Master Of Modernism

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Published: Tuesday, November 3, 1998
Section: DAILY BREAK , page E1
Source: BY ALEX MARSHALL
SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK

BACH WROTE his musical masterpieces in the 1700s at a time when many people considered his Baroque style passe. He proved them wrong.

Perhaps history might say the same about architect Richard Meier, the great master of modernism who labors away in the style three and four decades after its heyday. Meier designs smooth, gleaming white buildings that denote a purity of form and a fascination with light, space and structure.

Tonight, Meier will talk about his most recent project, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and share his thoughts on building, art and design. Meier will speak at Nauticus to the Hampton Roads chapter of the American Institute of Architects The event is open to the public.

Regardless of whether one is a fan of modernism, the architectural style developed after World War I that emphasized form and absence of ornamentation, no one denies that Meier is a colossus of the trade. He circles the globe with his fellow superstar colleagues such as I.M. Pei, Michael Graves and Cesar Pelli, touching down to build museums, airports and concert halls.

Meier has been in this select group for two decades, roughly since he designed the Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt in 1979. In 1984, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize – the “Nobel Prize of architecture” – at the relatively young age of 49.

However, Meier has entered an even more rarefied, and difficult, realm with his selection in 1984 to design the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Known as “the commission of the century,” it is probably the largest arts-related construction project ever attempted at one time. Funded by the fabulous wealth of J. Paul Getty, the center opened last December after 14 years of hard labor by Meier and his company.

The final cost: a cool $1 billion.

As Meier recounts in his candid book, “Building the Getty” (Knopf 1997), the project was “of such scale, complexity, cost, and ambition that it consumed my life. . . . The Getty Center project turned into a long personal and professional journey.”

For the Getty Center, Meier designed six off-white boxes and cylinders that dot a hillside overlooking Los Angeles. The entire campus takes up 24 acres on the 110-acre site. Visitors park in satellite lots at the bottom of the slopes and are ferried by train and tram to the buildings. The heart of the center is the Getty Museum, a world-class showcase for European painting, sculpture and other art. But the center also includes a research institute, a conservation institute and an educational institute.

Meier faced hurdles as much bureaucratic as physical. The nearby civic league, the Los Angeles City Council and the Getty board all had their hands on Meier’s pen. It took seven years of negotiations to finalize the design. The conflicts forced Meier to adapt and rethink his style. He is known for his signature white, for example, but the museum ended up being clad in light gray stone from Italy, in part because of the opposition of the Brentwood Homeowners Association to a gleaming white building.

In Meier’s previous work, white was usually his preferred color. “White is, in fact, the color which intensifies the perception of all other hues that exist in natural light and in nature. It is against a white surface that one best appreciates the play of light and shadow, solids and voids,” Meier says in his book “Richard Meier Architect, 1964/1984” (Rizzoli 1984).

And just how good is the Getty? Time will tell. The reviews have ranged from ecstatic to mildly critical. In sheer hoopla, it has been overshadowed by near adulation that has greeted architect Frank Gehry’s new Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain. With its titanium skin and cartoonish forms, Gehry’s building was praised by Hubert Muschamp of the New York Times as practically single-handedly saving contemporary art and culture. But the Getty Center is so much larger than Gehry’s Guggenheim, both in size and concept, that a comparison between them is not entirely fair. Meier graduated from architecture school at Cornell University in the late 1950s at a time when modernism was king. Victorian cornice lines, Art-Deco swirls or any other type of “decoration” were out. Instead, the lines of a building were presented nakedly to the viewer, unclothed so to speak. Meier admired Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier, who was perhaps the loudest proponent of modernism. However, Meier was also influenced by the clean horizontal lines of Frank Lloyd Wright.

In Meier’s Smith House, the first independent commission of his career, one can see all the elements that would occupy his work for the coming three decades. Built in 1965-67, the house is a cube of glass, held together by white bands and white columns. A lone white brick chimney shoots up one side. The home, overlooking Long Island Sound in Connecticut, is Olympian in its purity.

In 1974, after mostly building expensive private homes for a decade, Meier completed a public housing project, Twin Parks in the Bronx. In a variation on the classic Le Corbusier fashion, Meier placed medium-size towers in a park, with little clear street frontage or defined public space. Whether fairly or not, to critics the project’s sad fate shows the danger of modernist urban planning.

It was about this time that modernism as a whole came under increasing attack. Smooth boxes of glass and steel seemed cold to some people. Architect Robert Venturi declared that “less is a bore.” Many believed that modernist urban planning principles were destroying core cities by inserting freeways and tall buildings set on plazas. The profession moved on to post-modernism, deconstructionism and even traditionalism. However, Meier did not abandon modernism, and is, in fact, perhaps the leading practitioner of it today. And he resolutely defends the philosophy.

“Until I see something better, I would say that modern architecture is what is the cutting edge of architecture,” Meier said in an interview last week from his New York office. “It is architecture that has no historical baggage to it, that doesn’t make references to things outside of itself, that deals with light and space.”

He acknowledged, though, that modernists no longer want to replace historic Paris with freeways and skyscrapers set in parks, as Le Corbusier proposed.

“Today, we have a sensitivity to what exists already,” Meier said. “We no longer want to wipe the slate clean.”

With the Getty complete, Meier has hardly stopped working. In the past few years, he has designed the Contemporary Arts Museum in Barcelona, Spain; the Canal+ headquarters in Paris; and the City Hall and Library in The Hague. He continues to receive and compete for prestigious commissions in the United States and abroad.

But with the Getty Center now open, Meier says he knows his life’s biggest labor is probably behind him.