"Urban form evolves between type and incident, fabric and discontinuity, history and the moment of design. This dialogue strongly influenced the design of the Museum for the Decorative Arts in Frankfurt am Main. The parti developed out of a notion of context that takes in not only geographic features but also historical and typological ones. In this sense, and in contrast to some of the earlier buildings for more rural or less historic sites, the museum is emphatically a public and an urban institution, a rejection of the modernist isolation of the building as a free-standing object distanced from its surrounds. The scheme here is meant to connect: to respond to, enlarge, and reinforce the public context and the urban fabric."

— Richard Meier. from Richard Meier. Richard Meier: Architect 1964-1984. p269.

The Creator's Words

"I believe it is possible to see all of my work as a sequence of investigations into the spatial interchange between public and private realms. This interchange expresses itself in varying conceptions, but is always related in some way to a notion of architectural promenade. Finally, and again, mine is an attempt to find and redefine a sense of order, to understand, then, a relationship between what has been and what can be, to extract from our culture both the timeless and the topical."

— Richard Meier. from Eliot Noyes. On Architecture: Lecture by Richard Meier. p.30, 33.