Richard Meier, the architect whose flawless, light-filled buildings won him the 1984 Pritzker Prize -- architecture's equivalent to the Nobel Prize -- was on campus Oct. 30 through Nov. 3 for his inaugural visit as the Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor.
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| Porus Olpadwala, left, dean of Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning and chair of the Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professorship program, introduces renowned architect Richard Meier '57 in the Hartell Gallery of Sibley Hall, Oct. 30. Meier, a Rhodes Class of '56 Professor, was attending a reception for an exhibition of architectural drawings and photos of his most recent buildings. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography |
Meier, who is considered one of the world's most acclaimed and influential architects, attended an opening reception of an exhibition on his most recent buildings in Sibley Hall's Hartell Gallery, delivered a public lecture to an overflowing Kaufmann auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall and was a guest speaker in five architecture classes.
A graduate of Cornell's College of Architecture in 1957, Meier is perhaps most well known for his striking Getty Center, a complex of buildings in the Santa Monica hills just north of Los Angeles that includes the John Paul Getty Museum. Unlike most of Meier's buildings, the center's exterior cladding is not brilliant white -- admittedly his favorite color -- but rough-hewn stone in earth tones of pale gold. In Associate Professor Jonathan Ochshorn's class on Building Technology, Materials and Methods, Meier told students why he prefers white buildings, and how he was persuaded to vary his aesthetic with the Getty design.
"As a kid I liked going to the White Castle for hamburgers," he said, describing the smooth, shiny white tiles that still cover the hamburger chain's restaurants. He described how he has tried throughout his career to recreate in concrete and painted steel that memory of perfection.
His design for the Getty Center was chosen in a competition. Once the project began, however, a white exterior was ruled out by the project's benefactors. Meier complied reluctantly, choosing stone instead because of its association with "permanence, longevity, solidity, like the Getty as an institution." He searched worldwide for the ideal stone, something with texture and color varied and rugged enough to suggest the Grand Canyon. Eventually he settled on a building stone called travertine, which is so commonly used that Meier at first disdained it as "wallpaper." But he worked with an Italian quarry to develop a new method of cutting and treating it that gave him the surface he wanted. The clefting process yielded an unexpected bonus. "If you walk around the Getty, you can spot ancient fossils, of leaves, shells, in the stone," Meier said excitedly, confessing he kept the best fossil, of a ram's horn, for himself.
"My favorite building is always the one I just completed," said Meier, responding to a student's question. In both his public lecture and the materials class, he talked about his three most recent projects, the Church of the Year 2000 on the outskirts of Rome and two courthouses, one in Islip, N.Y., and one in Phoenix.
The church and community center, chosen by the Vatican in a competition over proposals by five other internationally prominent architects, is a stunningly original, deceptively simple concept. For the sacred part of the building, three enormous curvilinear shells of white precast concrete, based on three radiating circles, cantilever off the ground in ascending order like celestial entities; and for the community part of the building, rectilinear forms reflect the day-to-day function of the space.
In the materials class, Meier discussed how the curved shelves that define the church's exterior were cast to achieve perfectly smooth monolithic white surfaces and how they were assembled from smaller pieces and joined together almost seamlessly on the site. Because of the weight of each piece, and the crane needed to lift them, the ground needed to be stabilized and reinforced, he related.
In the public lecture, Meier talked about the influence of the great Italian architect Francesco Borromini on his work, particularly, "the way the light articulates the space" in his church of San Ivo della Sapienza. In Meier's courthouses and church, he showed the audience how skylights and banks of windows allow light to flow into the buildings through the top and sides during the day, and how the process is reversed at night, with light moving up from the buildings' base and spilling out onto the roofs. He also talked about how he designed the public space in the courthouses to contrast with the dimly lit corridors in many federal buildings. He wanted the space to be filled with light and open to views of expansive vistas. "It seemed to me that the public space for milling and waiting for stressful procedures, like naturalization and multi-defendant trials, should be an inviting space, where the sense of equality and democracy is personified in a building that addresses the needs of the community," he said.
Meier, who will visit campus twice a year for five years as a Rhodes Class of '56 Professor, will be back on campus next in spring 2001.
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