RICHARD MEIER & PA RT NERS FO R EWO R D BY PA U L G O L D B E R G E R LEADING ARCHITECTURAL CRITIC
Richard Meier has had one of the most extraordinary careers in American architecture. It began with one of the most remarkable houses ever designed by a young architect, the exquisitely beautiful Smith House in Darien, Connecticut, designed in 1965, when he was barely more than thirty. The acclaim of the house thrust Meier instantly into the forefront of American architects. The lyrical beauty of the façade of the Smith House, a patterned grid of glass that raises the small house to grand stature, is as compelling an image today, half a century later, as it was when the house was built on the shores of the Long Island Sound. It made Meier famous, but it also set a challenge before him, the same kind of challenge that early success foists on any kind of artist: how to continue to be creative, and how to avoid the temptation to respond to success by simply doing more and more of the same thing.
Meier did not churn out multiple versions of the Smith House, but neither did he respond to his early success by moving in a different direction. Instead, he began, slowly and methodically, to develop the refined, sensual beauty that had emerged in the Smith House, and to turn it toward many other kinds of buildings. Meier’s buildings are elegant, they are refined, and they are pristine. What makes them unusual, not to say extraordinary, is the extent to which they possess a degree of grace that is almost never associated with modern architecture. The beauty of a Meier building appears easy and natural, revealing nothing of the struggle that went into their making. His rigor is the rigor of constant refinement; his intellectual quest is the exploration of proportion and texture and light. He designs by instinct, not by theory— only that instinct is so refined that it takes on an intellectual power of its own. It becomes, in and of itself, an idea, the idea that modernism, a harsh thing in the hands of so many other architects, can be made into an object of romantic beauty.