Richard Meier - Frankfurt and Atlanta: my first museums (15/36)

It was the late 70s that I was invited to take part in a competition in Frankfurt for a new museum. In effect, actually, it's an addition. The Frankfurt Museum is an addition to an existing building from 1803 in the age of Goethe and Schenkel, which was like a four square, it was a cube. And this building had to attach to that, but it was really separate from it. And I remember Hans Hohlein and Venturi and someone else and I were invited to do this competition. And I won. That building then moved ahead. And it was approximately an area, approximately 100,000 square feet. And so after I won the competition, and I was working on that museum, I was interviewed in Atlanta for the Heim Museum. And I remember all I had to show was the model of the Frankfurt Museum. I had never done a museum. I've done exhibitions, but I'd never done a museum. So I showed them the model of the Frankfurt Museum. I said, oh, this is the kind of museum we're gonna do. And I'm amazed, but we were selected as architects, never having really built a museum before. And so the Heim Museum was really the first built museum because the Frankfurt Museum, although it started before the Heim Museum and the way they built in Europe and in Germany in particular, it takes a lot longer. They were both the same size and both about the same budget. And the Frankfurt Museum was built in five years and the Heim Museum in three years. So the Heim Museum, although it started later, finished earlier and received a good bit of acclaim at the time, was very important then in sort of my getting other museums as a result. And the whole idea that I wanted to have for the Heim Museum because Atlanta's cultural community was decimated with the airplane accident at Orly Airport in which 110 people lost their life from Atlanta on a trip to Paris to look at art. And so in a sense, this building was to commemorate those in the community and to show that the community loves art and it's sort of moving on after this terrible accident. And so it seemed it needed a social space, being Atlanta, as much as a museum space. And so the museum is organized around a top lit atrium in the center and take a ramp from one level to another. And I've always loved the Guggenheim Museum. It's a great building. New York is so lucky to have this building of Frank Lloyd Wright. And I did a little reading room renovation in the Guggenheim. But it always seemed to me that the sloping floors and the sloping ceilings and the sloping walls sort of put you on a kind of propelling motion as you're going down the ramp as you're looking at art. And that the great thing about that space is you can look at a work close up, then you move away and you see it from a distance. You see it in a different way. And then you move again and you see it again. This whole idea of seeing a work of art from multiple points of view, I felt was very important. So at the High Museum, the idea was to straighten out the Guggenheim by putting the art on flat floors and having a ramp which took you from level to level but enabled you to look through the galleries and see the galleries from different perspectives. So in a sense, you could say the High Museum was straightening out the Guggenheim. And then Frankfurt? Well, Frankfurt is, again, another kind of situation because you move by ramp from level to level. And again, the circulation space is different from the gallery space. But the nature of the collection at Frankfurt was such that it's this decorative arts. It's relatively small-scale objects. And so the spaces that show the art had to be kind of broken down and scaled to be in relation to the collection. And so the ramp wall that you move through, again, looks into the galleries but it also looks out to the city and to the river, to the Rhine on which it sits and is located. Yet, it seemed to me, again, the movement system should be gradual, it should be leisurely, and it should relate both to the interior and to the exterior space. It's similar in concept to the High Museum but different in form.