If there's anyone in town worthy of the annoying moniker "starchitect," it's Richard Meier.

After earning an architecture degree from Cornell, Meier had short-lived gigs at Skidmore Owings Mills and Marcel Breuer before starting his own architecture studio in 1963. Meier rose to prominence as the most famous member of the New York Five, the legendary clique of modernist architects that also Robert A.M. Stern, Peter Eisenman, and Michael Graves. Known for his sleek Le Corbusier-inspired designs and his (over)use of the color white, he's since designed a wide range of public and private edifices, including upscale residences, commercial buildings, courthouses, condo towers, and museums. Among his creations: corporate offices for Siemens, Swissair, and Canon; Atlanta's celebrated High Museum of Art; the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills; and Barcelona's Museum of Contemporary Art, which was completed in 1995. His greatest work is widely considered to be the Getty Center, the sprawling art museum/research center in LA, which was completed in 1997 at a cost of $1.2 billion. In New York, Meier is best known for the three all-glass towers he designed at 173 and 176 Perry Street and 165 Charles Street in the West Village. The projects generated enormous buzz, but the Perry Street development turned into a PR disaster when residents complained about leaky ceilings, heating problems and buckling balcony floors. Meier was eventually compelled to correct the building's laundry list of structural flaws, which he has maintained were the construction crew's fault. [Image via Getty]