Richard Meier’s Revolutionary New Project Aims to Give Newark a Boost

It takes a deep respect for a place to make an 82-year-old architect change his ways. For Richard Meier , an unusual commission in his birth city of Newark, New Jersey, was just the ticket. Completed this week, Teachers Village, the first phase of a citywide redevelopment for which Meier was tapped, is a series of three mixed-use buildings whose façades offer a delicate interplay between the architect’s signature all-white aesthetic and, herein lies a major departure, brick.

The firm employed iron-speckled brick, which glimmers with the day’s changing light.

Though the project was in many ways untethered to local history—three ground-up living structures in a city that hadn’t seen a ground-up residential construction in decades—a connection with Newark’s downtown vernacular was crucial to the firm and the project’s developers, RBH Group.

“We wanted it to be contextual; we wanted it to blend in with the urban fabric,” says Vivian Lee, a longtime Richard Meier architect and associate partner-in-charge on the project, referencing Newark’s extensive collection of turn-of-the-century structures. “We basically had to learn how to do a brick building."

Teachers Village is home to three charter schools and 206 residential units for the teachers who serve the local community.

But Richard Meier using brick is not the project’s only novelty. Teachers Village—which, all told, houses three charter schools, 206 residential units, and a number of ground-level retail spaces—offers an altogether unheard-of riff on affordable worker housing. Teachers, those working in local schools and in nearby communities, have first dibs on the rental apartments, which are offered at some 60 percent of the median income.

While measuring success for such a monumental project takes time, a few indicators show the firm is well on its way. As of this week, occupancy rates hovered around 97 percent for the residential units, with plenty of commercial tenants in line to follow. Beyond this, the project is set to receive LEED Neighborhood Development certification, an elusive designation given to community-wide projects that meet its stringent criteria for urban development and sustainable design.

But perhaps most important is how this project is a launchpad for future Newark renewal, both in forthcoming Richard Meier projects and in other development endeavors.

As Meier himself put it, “Anything we can do to help the whole city, and I believe this project does, we’re proud to do it.”