Silvio Cassara is an architect and professor of Architectural History at the University of Bologna, Italy. A visiting professor at several American universities, he is a keen critical observer of American architectural and urban design projects--New York in particular. His primary specialty is American modernism and the work of Richard Meier.

Beginning with his ascent in the late 1960s, the work of Richard Meier has been identified with a careful but decisive reflection on modernity, its origins, and the possibility of being a continuing source of innovation.

Collected here for the first time in paperback are the large-scale projects Meier developed during the last decade---mature works that coincide with his growing renown as one of the world"s foremost architects. His reflections on being heir to an abstract modernist ethic meld together with his concepts of the city and the contemporary landscape in diverse projects such as the Getty Center in Los Angeles, museums for Atlanta and Barcelona, and residential highrises in New York.

Meier"s recent architecture features numerous large public works, using their monumentality to reimagine and reshape contemporary civic spaces. The recent Church for the Jubilee in Rome demonstrates the conjunction of modernity with simplicity and emotion of form, light, and material.

Richard Meier and architecture

as a privileged place

Silvio Cassara

Works

Appendix

Biography

Bibliography

Photographs

Acknowledgments