Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Architect Richard Meier’s Jewish Inspirations

The Newark-born American Jewish architect Richard Meier, who celebrates his 75th birthday on October 12, is being feted with an all-too-brief exhibit, “Meier 75” at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. The exhibit is scheduled to end on Meier’s birthday, which shows party pooper planning on the part of the Cooper-Hewitt committee that have chosen to open it too late, close it too early or both.

“Meier 75” includes architectural drawings for some of Meier’s most famous projects, like the J. Paul Getty Center (1984-97) and the Iglesia del Jubileo (Jubilee Church; 1996–2003), outside central Rome, Meier being the only Jewish architect in history to design a Roman Catholic Church.

Known for his gleaming white surfaces and smoothly curved, ocean liner-like surfaces which seem influenced by the International Style or Le Corbusier’s High Court at Chandigarh, Meier’s range of influences is often underestimated. Overlooked is the influential 1963 exhibition which he curated at the Jewish Museum “Recent American Synagogue Architecture,”, the fruit of his early work in New York with the Davis, Brody and Wisniewski (1958-9), and Marcel Breuer (1960-63), both firms which designed synagogues. Although Meier has reportedly yet to design a synagogue himself, his typically elegant Hanukkah Lamp of tin-coated copper, now in the Jewish Museum argues unusual flair with liturgical design.

Art historians claim that Meier played a key role in alerting the modern artist Frank Stella to the landmark 1959 publication, Wooden Synagogues by Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka, which inspired Stella’s much-vaunted Polish Village Series of paintings. With a flood of new projects, including a luxury tower on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard Meier has clearly not finished surprising and delighting lovers of modern architecture.

Watch Bravo’s The Real Housewives of NYC “super socialite” Kelly Killoren Bensimon as she manages to get beyond the surprising length and fullness of her hair to go “Behind the Hedges” into “Richard Meier’s World” in the Hamptons.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.