We thought famous architect Richard Meier's perfectly sleek, gorgeous-looking white buildings were inspired by Minimalism or Malevich, the sublime. Dead wrong we were. In the architect's own words, the clue to Meier's pure, whitewashed trademark design: (http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/00/11.9.00/Meier_visit.html)
In 2000, as a visiting professor at Cornell University, Meier told students why he prefers white buildings, and how he was persuaded to vary his aesthetic with the Getty design (where he included non-white, earth-looking travertine stone).
"As a kid I liked going to the White Castle for hamburgers," he said, describing the smooth, shiny white tiles that still cover the hamburger chain's restaurants. He described how he has tried throughout his career to recreate in concrete and painted steel that memory of perfection.
Richard Meier, a white trash white supremacist (in color choice only) embedded within the celebrity architects. Now you know, the Getty perched up on the hill above LA is but a White Castle gone stratospherically huge. I have seen the light and I'll never look at Meier's buildings the same. How come nobody ever made the connection? A search on google under Richard Meier “White Castle” yields only two results: the revelation above and a note by a sarcastic Atlanta travel writer whose note on the High Museum of Art reads: (http://www.thebigrockcandymountain.com/thingstodo.html):
You could probably kill a couple of hours in this museum - but don't expect anything that compares with a decent art museum in any other major metropolis (even the New Orleans Museum of Art has a better collection and is housed in a far more beautiful building). The building, by "renowned" architect Richard Meier (all of whose buildings look suspiciously like one another), resembles an out-of-control White Castle.
A visit to the High Museum’s website indeed confirms this writer’s account and a depressing pattern of the type of museum we're irreversibly immersed in: the collections are uninteresting to put it mildly and certainly unworthy of the High’s fame around the world. That might be the reason for their focusing on buildings by celebrity architects (Meier first, now outrageously-in-demand Renzo Piano) and blockbusters like “Rings” (a thing on Frodo’s world timed for the Olympic Games 1996), “Norman Rockwell” and “Andrew Wyeth”.
High Art this is not.
Google’s description of the High is fitting and exact: Cultural tourism destination and entertainment attraction.
The museum of the 21st century. A big bad White Castle, with all the fat and a twenty-dollar tag.
