High Museum of Art, Atlanta

By Patrick Totty

Twice in one 14-year period architect Richard Meier designed two museums that not only were breathtaking gifts to their respective cities, but also reasserted the vigor and inventiveness of modern architecture – qualities that many postmodernist designers and critics had claimed were long gone.

The more famous of Meier’s museums, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, completed in 1997, was the later of the two. The massive complex, overlooking West Los Angeles from a perch above the city’s busiest freeway, was a bold restatement of modern architecture’s ability to use steel, glass and other modern industrial materials to create elegant, rational, sculptural forms that didn’t descend to pastiche or deconstruction for their impact.

The Getty was a culmination of concepts that Meier had earlier worked out in Atlanta at the High Museum, which opened in 1983. The museum, founded in 1905, was looking for a signature building that people could immediately bring to mind whenever they heard its name. Meier delivered brilliantly, delivering a gleaming steel and concrete building, covered with dazzling, brilliant white porcelain-enameled steel panels, whose curving four-story facade was punctuated by a grid of huge windows that seemed to command light to pour in. The museum, despite its great size and structural strength, sat lightly and delicately on the land.

Atlantans quickly realized that Meier had done their city a great favor. The High’s new building, located in midtown, quickly became the nucleus of an arts and business district that added to Atlanta’s already growing reputation as the South’s most important urban center. The High’s prestige, further cemented in 1991 when the American Institute of Architects named it one of the 10 best works of American architecture in the 1980s, was a contributing factor to Atlanta’s successful bid to host the games of the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Today the museum is the leading art museum in the Southeast. It is also a high-profile institution, boasting the eighth largest museum membership in the country. Its 11,000 works of art draw more than 500,000 visitors annually to its core collections of photography, folk art, and African, European and American art.

http://www.high.org/index_flash.html