Richard Meier

Richard Meier is an architect who established his own practice in 1963, launching it from his apartment with a house for his parents in Essex Fells, New Jersey. The Smith House in Darien, Connecticut, from 1965, brought him national attention, and he went on to convert the former Bell Telephone Laboratories in Manhattan's Greenwich Village into apartments, to complete the Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1979, and to finish the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 1983. At 49 he became the youngest architect to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 1984, and soon afterward he was commissioned to design the Getty Center, the art complex in Los Angeles funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust. He names Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto and Mies van der Rohe among his influences and describes architecture as a long continuum of tradition.