Richard Meier - The problem with organic architecture

Architecture is about making of space. It's about how you show what, how you create places that people move through and live in and work in and exist in. And going back to the early work, in some ways my parents' house was very much influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. I'd been to Falling Water, you know, the most extraordinary building in the world. I mean, there's nothing like it. Frank Lloyd, and Frank Lloyd Wright as a student, I read everything that he'd ever written. You know, you become enamored with Wright, no matter, you can't help it. And when I did my parents' house, I had brick walls, which began in the living room and then extended out into the garden. And it seemed to me that this was in keeping with Wright's notion of the extension of space, you know, from interior to exterior. And the walls would then become garden walls and the interior walls would become the elements which defined the living room and dining room and bedroom spaces. And each space then opened out to a garden with these walls. And when the house was all finished, I looked at it and, you know, I liked it, but I said, you know, interior is different from exterior. The minute you put up a glass membrane, that wall, which is on the inside, doesn't weather, and that wall, which is on the outside, does weather. Moss grows on the brick, it changes color slightly. Outside is not the same as the inside. And this notion of organic architecture, although it sounds wonderful, is wrong. It can work in certain climates, you know, perhaps in Southern California, but in the Northeast, you have to protect the materials. The wood, which you cut down and use as a building material, is no longer organic. The tree is dead. You have to protect that wood. You can protect it by staining it or by painting it. So, after that, I said, you know, architecture is man-made, which is organic. And around us, the changing light of the day, the trees, that's organic. So, there's a relationship between what's man-made and what's organic. And as an architect, I can only deal with that which is man-made. And therefore, the painting of white to show that it's man-made, the articulation of space, the whiteness in the way it shows a difference between opacity and transparency, between planar surfaces and linear surfaces, are all part of sort of the philosophy that began, say, with the Smith House and then developed over the years.