Mana Contemporary is now home to one of the most celebrated architects of our time, Richard Meier.

The new space at Mana Contemporary replaces Richard Meier’s previous 3,600-square-foot model museum in Long Island City, with a 15,000-square-foot suite on the art center’s 2nd floor. The grand space features The Richard Meier Model Museum, in addition to the architect’s personal studio and research library. The gallery section rotates exhibitions of his art such as: prints; sketches; renderings; photographs; and sculptures. The architect’s daughter, furniture designer Ana Meier, joins the space as well with The Ana Meier Furniture Showroom.

Photo: manacontemporary.com

Photo: manacontemporary.com

Richard Meier’s 150-plus, model collection spans the entirety of architect’s prolific career, going back to the 1965 Smith House, one of the early projects which established his reputation. Highlights of the Model Museum include large-scale, study models of the Getty Center in Los Angeles. The research center will be open to students and practicing architects alike, and will hopefully serve as both an incubator and educational resource for emerging architects and designers.

“Richard Meier’s new space at Mana Contemporary will reveal his intricate design process to a wider audience,” said Eugene Lemay, founder and director of Mana Contemporary. “We are honored to be the home of not only the museum but also a research institute for ongoing study

Photo: manacontemporary.com

Photo: manacontemporary.com

Richard Meier recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the establishment of his firm in New York City. In 1984, Meier became the youngest individual architect to be awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture, considered the field’s highest honor. Meier’s international body of work is acclaimed for its abstraction, formal clarity, and uncompromising all-white facades. The absence of color is an intrinsic characteristic of his oeuvre /works; his philosophy is grounded in using light as the main material to give form to his precise, linear architecture.

Not unlike his buildings—with their uncompromising linearity, precise use of natural light, and stark white facades—Richard Meier is a striking figure. In his signature round spectacles, a perfectly pressed suit, and with that recognizable shock of white hair, the Pritzker Prize-winning modernist invited filmmaker Barbara Anastacio on a tour of the newly opened Richard Meier Model Museum. “It’s a wonderful feeling to hover over a lifetime of Meier’s work,” says New York-based Anastacio of the space occupying the second floor of Mana Contemporary gallery in Jersey City, New Jersey. “You get a real insight into the process of making architecture, how it evolves from an abstract idea to an actual building.

It’s like the Ariadne’s thread into Meier’s mind and creative labyrinth.” The museum houses Meier’s personal art studio, a research library, and rotating exhibitions, in addition to more than 300 of Meier’s models. The comprehensive collection spans the entirety of the grand master’s career: from his 1965 Smith House in Connecticut, to the iconic, sprawling Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Perry Street glass towers that line the West Side Highway in lower Manhattan. “It was important for me to have Meier looking over his own creations,” says Anastacio. “Lost in his own private utopia, in a momentaneous nostalgia.”

Richard Meier’s Models on Nowness.com

Gagosian Gallery Expansion
Beverly Hills, California
2008 – 2010

Photo: richardmeier.com

Photo: richardmeier.com

High Museum Of Art , Photo richardmeier.com

*Please note that the Richard Meier Model Museum is open by appointment only. If you wish to schedule a tour to visit The Richard Meier Model Museum please email M.Museum@richardmeier.com

- via manacontemporary.com