Richard Meier and Partners

Richard Meier and Partners enters the story as the Los Angeles firm that hired Bernadette Fox after her work on the Team Disney Building and gave her a role on the Getty Center grounds. Its project placed her amid the material she would question: thousands of tons of Italian travertine, including stone rejected for minor inconsistencies. The firm’s archives later could not locate the drawings for her proposal to put that discarded material to use.

Recruitment and the Getty Center

After the Team Disney job ended, Michael Graves offered Fox a position back in New York. She preferred the freedom of the Los Angeles architecture scene, and, on Graves’s recommendation, Richard Meier and Partners hired her. The firm was already working on the Getty Center grounds, and Fox joined a group of about six young architects responsible for sourcing, importing, and quality-checking the sixteen thousand tons of travertine that would sheath the museum.

The assignment made Fox a participant in the project’s material decisions as well as a young architect working within its hierarchy. At her day job, she grew indignant at the waste involved in shipping stone from Italy only for her superiors to reject pieces over minor inconsistencies. The contrast between the care required to procure the travertine and the ease with which usable material could be discarded became the starting point for a proposal beyond her assigned work.

Fox’s proposal and the firm’s response

Fox spent a month secretly designing a fountain, museum, and viewing platforms for a visitors center near the Watts Towers, using travertine rejected by the Getty. When she presented the plan to Getty management, it was quickly rejected. The proposal thus brought her architectural initiative into conflict with the firm’s immediate priority of completing the Getty project and with the reputational concerns surrounding reuse of its rejected material.

Richard Meier and Partners could not later find Fox’s drawings in its Getty Center archives. The record establishes their absence from the archive, not what happened to the designs; Paul Jellinek speculated that Fox had thrown them away. Their disappearance leaves the proposal’s material and architectural ambition more visible in recollection than in surviving documentation.

Significance in Fox’s career

The firm’s role in Fox’s story is defined by this tension between a large, prestigious building project and her effort to redirect its excess materials toward another public use. The Getty assignment exposed her to a system in which the project’s completion took precedence over her unsolicited plan. Yet the proposal also marked the formation of a distinct architectural principle for Fox: waste nothing. Richard Meier and Partners is therefore both the employer that placed her among the rejected travertine and the institutional setting against which her independent point of view took shape.