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.
Richard Meier Photograph by Richard Phibbs
And that is what Meier has continued to do, an achievement all the more impressive as he has expanded his repertoire from houses to larger buildings at no cost to the strength and clarity of his architecture. It is one thing to design a single-family house of exquisite, delicate beauty, and it is quite another to bring these qualities to high-rise buildings constructed by commercial developers. In the mid-2000’s Meier designed his first high-rise condominiums, three towers along the Hudson River at the western edge of Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, and they were received with an acclaim equal to that of the Smith House: as he had done in that small waterfront house decades before, Meier all but reinvented a familiar kind of building, and demonstrated that it could have a lightness and a grace that no other architect, it seemed, had been able to achieve.
Meier showed that he could build at urban scale without compromising the fundamental delicacy and precision of his architecture, and that it was possible for a condominium tower to be as light and as serene as a small, single-family house.
The soft, glowing forms of Meier’s glass and white steel towers quickly made them a landmark in New York, and brought invitations to design other towers in cities around the world. As with his houses, Meier has remained consistent while never duplicating a design, taking the vocabulary that he has created and adopting it to the particulars of different sites and different cities. Now, he is doing the same thing as his architecture comes, for the first time, to Hawaii. Meier’s two Gateway Towers will mark where the Howard Hughes Corporation’s ambitious Ward Village development meets the Honolulu waterfront. The design was chosen in an architectural competition in 2013 when the Hughes Corporation, after studying the work of more than twenty of the world’s most prominent architects, invited the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Woods Bagot and Richard Meier & Partners to submit proposals for a pair of towers for what was arguably the most prominent site at Ward Village. Because Hughes hoped to attract many of the world’s most eminent architects to build at Ward Village, the Gateway Towers was even more critical, since it would set a tone of high architectural ambition as well as serve as a kind of “front door” to the entire complex. In the summer of 2013, all four architects presented their plans at the company’s headquarters in Dallas. Many of the schemes proposed symmetrical towers, interpreting the idea of a “gateway” literally. Richard Meier and his partner, Michael Palladino, had another idea altogether, and designed two distinctly different towers: a tall, narrow slab, nicknamed “the blade,” and a lower, rounded tower, nicknamed “the cylinder.” The towers shared Meier’s well-known design vocabulary of white-painted steel and glass and the light, open feeling of his work, but they were in other ways a departure, a pair of sculptural forms designed with great attention to the unusual demands of a site that was as challenging as it was conspicuous.
Smith House Photograph by Scott Frances
Photograph by Scott Frances
For a city that was accustomed to ordinary, even banal, high-rise buildings that were attractive only to people inside them who could look out at the views of Diamond Head and the water, Meier’s Gateway Towers held forth the promise of being every bit as alluring on the outside as within. Instead of establishing a static, formal gateway, the differently shaped towers play off against each other as sculptural forms, creating a sense of movement and change as you approach them. And the shapes work from both inside and out: the cylindrical tower both offers a range of views and opens up views of Diamond Head and the water from elsewhere, while the slab tower forms a handsome, serene backdrop.
In the two Gateway towers the celebrated elegance of Richard Meier’s architecture will have a double purpose: it will yield beautiful living space within, and it will enrich the entire cityscape of Honolulu.
RICHARD MEIER & PA RT N E RS : C R E AT O R S O F T H E WORLD'S MOST EXTRAORDINARY HOMES
Douglas House Photograph by Scott Frances
Richard Meier & Partners ocean front homes are a testament to the firm's ability to blur the line between indoor and outdoor, creating uplifting spaces that invite the elements in. Here, a huge expanse of glass windows and sliding doors connect the double-height living room to the Pacific Ocean beyond. The combination of clear glass and white walls ensures that the true colors of the natural landscape set the stage for daily life.
Photograph by Scott Frances
Meier's ambitious Perry Street Condominiums in Manhattan not only represented a paradigm shift in the way that New York residences were conceived—but they also changed the city's skyline. Transparent and minimalist in form, the towers offer expansive views of the Hudson River and the surrounding urban landscape. Viewed from the water, their optimistic white-and-glass façades convey a distinct, fresh point of view. Following the success of these first residential towers in Manhattan, Meier is now making his mark on a handful of global cities with condominium projects underway in Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and now Honolulu.
173-176 Perry Street Condominium Photograph by Scott Frances
MAKING AN EXTRAORDINARY S TAT E M E N T O N G R E AT CITIES AROUND THE WORLD