Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Richard Meier
American; 20th-century
Des Moines, IA: 4700 Grand Avenue
87%
Des Moines Art Center. 1948, 1966, 1985 (with I.M. Pei and Eliel Saarinen)
It's a bit unseemly to judge Saarinen's building by Pei's addition, and to appraise both of these structures in sum with Meier's '85 appendage. But the Des Moines Art Center presents itself as an autonomous artwork comprising the work, combined, of each of these three architects; it would be critically goofy to try and prise the building apart for evaluation's sake. And besides, it's a diachronic masterpiece of modern architecture's many stages: Saarinen's understated, somewhat workaday elegance; Pei's midcentury surety of form (but also his lightness of touch, which the concrete he's used makes the more remarkable); Meier's eccentricity. What's great about the building in toto, however, is not the discrete charm of each of these three components, but the way their juxtaposition within one whole draws out aspects of each man's style which you seldom elsewhere have cause to see. Meier looks orderly alongside Pei, his sudden curves and protuberant rectangles more justified — governed, centered — than they usually do on their own. Pei's weightiness, next to Saarinen, takes on a cosmic quality that can get muddled by his rigorous massing. Saarinen, despite his somewhat old-world sensibility, appears here with his sweeping facades, squatness, and well-chosen materials (that characteristic brick) like the source of it all. The three buildings come together in a courtyard that is one of the single greatest spaces in 20th-century design. (TFS, 2025)
Atlanta, GA: 1280 Peachtree Street NE
72%
High Museum of Art. 1983
A non-aesthetic critique of Meier's museum buildings, including this one: with all their weird crannies and alienating caverns of empty space, they're fucking terrible for looking at art in; things lose track of themselves endlessly. An aesthetic critique of Meier's museum buildings, including this one: they depend upon the visual unity of their color and materials — Meier's famous white enamel-coated panels, interspersed with windows — to make up for their disunity of shape and mass. Is this the point? Of course it is. Does that matter to our appraisal of them as works of art? Sometimes. There's virtuosity, in the High Museum, to the way a slender band of glass might accent an otherwise punishingly self-similar plane, or to the way a facade might fragment to fall away into a narrow corridor that ends, frustrated, with a wall. Such touches would be infelicities of design were it not for the visual regularity which Meier's characteristic language of smooth white grids provides, which in its barraging sameness serves as a stabilizing ground for all the eccentricity of structure. But sometimes the infelicities are just infelicities: the overall footprint is actually much more tame than it lets on from most vantages on the ground — it's square, blocky, stout — which makes Meier's flourishes seem like flicks of the wrist rather than exigencies of some grand structural order. (TFS, 2025)