Richard Meier - A global playing field for architects (31/36)

The change that also has occurred during this period in the, I should say, I can't say ease of transportation, but in fact it is, because today you can get on a plane and tomorrow you're in Tokyo or Rome, wherever. The ease of communication is something. For reasons which are not that clear to me, only in recent times has the United States embraced architects from all over the world and in fact sought them out in order to, in a sense, attract attention to what they're doing. When the High Museum decided that they were going to have an addition, they didn't come to me. They said, we need to have an architect that can make the headlines the way Richard Mayer put the High Museum on the map when he designed the first building. And we can't do it with Richard Mayer because everyone knows Richard Mayer. Therefore, we have to find a foreign architect to do that. And so they chose someone that would, in a sense, bring attention to the new building in the way that they had hoped it would. And a lot of institutions say, gee, if they did that, that's what we should do. So you go to a place like Des Moines, Iowa, and they hire an English architect because they say he'll make a splash for our museum because he's not from Des Moines, he's not from the Midwest, he's not from the United States. But that was before the splash culture appeared. And so it's sort of the idea of splash that then enables lots of people from all over the world to get work here. People in India don't, or Japan, or elsewhere, don't come to American architects for the same reasons, except in Dubai, or Abu Dhabi, or places like that, where it's being run by splash masters. And they feel this is a way of not only giving it credibility, but giving it some pizzazz that it wouldn't have if there was another way of doing it. Well, that doesn't mean that the Chinese government doesn't also have this attitude, and therefore came to me to do six houses in China in order that these houses, in a sense, show a different way of creating space and a different lifestyle, in a sense. So when they came to me, and I started working on these houses, I said to one of the members of our client, I said, you know, we have a Chinese kitchen and a Western kitchen in the house. I said, well, I know how to design a Western kitchen, but I'm not familiar with the organization of a Chinese kitchen. So I need a little help to kind of tell me, how do I organize a Chinese kitchen? Is that a refrigerator, a stove? He said, don't worry. I said, what do you mean? No one's gonna cook there. I said, what do you mean no one's gonna cook there? These houses are not for someone to live in. These are houses for exhibition. These are houses which we're gonna have, and people will come from the countryside and all over, and this is what they'll aspire to. But no one's gonna live there. No. Can I make up a story like that? Yeah. So that's what we're doing. So tell us about, in your lifetime, how did the client change the development? Did the client change? One year to go, one year to go? I mean, all the clients are different. The Chinese client, there's no one person. I mean, it's just sort of this kind of group changes, floats in and out. There's no one head of the organization. Although I met someone in China and presented a project to him and said yes. That's all he said, yes, okay. But it's not like he said, you know, make the Chinese kitchen bigger. For instance, the client in Miami, different kind of client? Well, no, but the client in Miami is very different from the client in New York. Both developers and the attitude is very different. So I don't think it's more, I don't think it's so much the times as the people are different. Well, no, actually, one of the things that has changed quite dramatically is that in many of these situations in which we work, whether it's with a developer, an institution, or even the government, many of the people that we're dealing with are architects, trained as architects, and therefore come with, in a sense, a greater understanding of the process and also everything else, you know. And that has really been very helpful in many respects because they understand, you know, what it takes to make something and how it's done. And they understand the process. And so it's not really dealing with someone who's not knowledgeable. Clients are much more knowledgeable and much more professional than before.