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.