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Richard Meier
Richard Meier, modernist icon and longtime Sagaponack resident, is widely reknowned for his inventive interpretations of the International Style. Perhaps less known is that during his early career in New York he was architect by day and Abstract Expressionist painter at night, living with Frank Stella at the artist's 11th Street loft in Manhattan. He gave it up, however, to start his own architecture practice and quickly became a heavyweight in the field. In 1984, he won the coveted Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest accolade, and to this day Meier remains the award's youngest recipient. That same year he embarked on the Getty Center in L.A., a 13-year project that would help validate the early accolades. In New York, his gleaming residential towers at Perry Street have housed the likes of Calvin Klein, Martha Stewart and Nicole Kidman. In the Hamptons, Meier is known as the mastermind behind the "Houses at Sagaponac Project," an expansive development of cutting-edge homes designed by a roster of young international architects. Still in progress, the project was a backlash against the McMansion epidemic and an attempt to revive the Hamptons' reputation as a hotbed of modernism. Renowned internationally for cultural projects like the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona and the Jubilee Church in Rome, one of his most notable projects is the Saltzman House. Built in East Hampton in 1969, it was designed as a "counterpoint to nature" and appears to drift across its pristine lawn like a Cubist ghost ship. |
