I am disappointed by Richard Meier when he walks into the boardroom of his Manhattan offices to introduce himself. He is one of the world’s leading architects, and yet all I see is a man of bland efficiency – dark tie, pressed white shirt, locks of silver hair neatly brushed.

Yet, as Mies van der Rohe liked to say, and as Meier well knows, “the devil is in the details”, and when he sits down, and his shirt cuffs drop back, I begin to wonder if Richard Meier might actually be the Devil: a silver chain of turquoise and purple links circles one bear-like wrist, and on the other are hefty leather and copper bracelets.

Perhaps these flashes of power shouldn’t be surprising – when architects reach Meier’s stature they take on a demiurgic aura. Meier is the architect of the headquarters of Canal+ in Paris, of the High Museum in Atlanta, and the Vatican’s Jubilee Church, Dio Padre Misericordioso, in Rome. In 1984, when he was 50, he became the youngest architect to win the discipline’s highest honour, the Pritzker Prize; and then he promptly won the £1 billion commission to build the Getty Centre in Los Angeles, a mini-city on a hill, which would occupy him for 12 years. “You’re not going to change the world through architecture,” Meier tells me – but I know he is thinking that he will give it a shot.

Meier has never built in Britain, yet a survey of his career has opened the Louise T. Blouin Institute in Notting Hill, West London. It gives the overview of his architecture that you would expect – dramatised with models and photographs – but it also reveals much more, because, well, Meier just can’t stop. He has produced furniture and fittings (I discovered I was sitting on his chair, leaning on his table and drinking tea from his cup and saucer). He has sculpted, creating small angular structures reminiscent of Anthony Caro and Eduardo Paolozzi. And he collages: “I travel a lot, and on the airplane I have a book that sits just between the seats. I can do collages for six hours at a time from New York to California. I’ve completed 105 books."

Meier was born and raised in New Jersey. “My mother did volunteer work; my father was in the liquor business.” He experienced no profound calling to architecture, but, “when I was 14, some friends of my parents came for dinner and asked me what I was going to do. I said I wanted to be an architect.”

Early certainty notwithstanding, Meier attended night school to train as a painter after graduating as an architect. He seems to have been serious about this for a time. Until, that is, he received a silent rebuff. “I rented a studio that happened to be next to de Kooning’s studio on Tenth Street. I remember, he came in one day and looked at what I was doing and just walked out without saying a word. I sat there and I thought [looking at his own pictures], these are would-be de Koonings. I’m stopping.”

If Meier occupies a special place in architecture, it is as one of the greatest interpreters of the Modern tradition. “When I was a student,” he continues, “the three architects I looked to the most were Le Corbusier, Aalto and Wright. But Le Corbusier I think is extraordinary. I never cease to marvel at him.”

He met him in Paris in 1957, and, oddly, received another rebuff. “We met by accident,” Meier says. “It was the opening of a building he had done with Luis Costa – the Maison de Brésil. He was sitting on a bench, and I went over and introduced myself. We had a conversation and he explained to me that he wouldn’t have any Americans in his office.” (Le Corbusier seems to have harboured suspicions of American plots after he lost commissions that he thought should have been his.)

So Meier returned to New York and started work in Marcel Breuer’s office. He opened his own practice in 1963. Typically, his buildings are wildly abstract, cubistic compositions of white slanting planes, white pipe railings and white enamelled panels that barely enclose their airy, light-drenched interiors. One critic has called them “transcendental . . . quintessentially American”. Sceptics may characterise his larger complexes as spectral research facilities, but his houses are always realised dreams of modern living.

Nothing Meier builds looks like what it is - his houses don’t have front doors and pitched roofs that say “home” – and that quality has always been essential to him. “I’m not interested in creating representational space,” he says. “I’m interested in abstract space. If anything, I’d like my buildings to be more abstract. As Frank Stella said: ‘What you see is what you get’, and architecture isn’t about making allusions to an airplane or a ship or an automobile. It’s about making space.” Meier is so devoted to this work of designing and building for the world that he appears never to have lavished his talents on himself. He built a house for his parents in the 1960s, but he has never bothered to build his own. He owns a simple summer house on Long Island, built in 1907, and hasn’t altered it much. He’s a New Yorker: he plays tennis, he doesn’t cook and he lives in a loft in Manhattan. Maybe family would encourage him to build, but he divorced in the early 1980s, hasn’t remarried, and his children are in their twenties.

As I am leaving, I ask about his son, Joseph, who, it has been reported, studied architecture. Might he take up his father’s legacy? Apparently not, as he is now a sculptor in Rome. Perhaps that’s still within his father’s creative shadow – but his daughter, Ana, is surely safe, having become a fashion designer. Wrong again. Father and daughter have just collaborated on a cashmere cardigan and sweater. “Anything you come into contact with, I like to think about,” Meier tells me, and that’s why he just can’t stop.

— Richard Meier: Art and Architecture is at the Louise T. Blouin Institute, 3 Olaf Street, London W11 (020-7985 9600, www.ltbfoundation.org)

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