The following is an excerpt from Arrive Magazine's May/June issue, pictured above. Click on image to enlarge.  Victoria Meyers architect, for hanrahan Meyers architects

Six People Changing the Way We Live
by Kris Frieswick

Growing up surrounded by the wide spaces and light of Abilene, Texas, for half the year, and densely forested, rural Pennsylvania the other half, award-winning architect Victoria Meyers developed a lifelong craving for nature and light.  In her work she strives to bring both those elements into the projects designed by her and her partner Tom Hanrahan.  A devotee of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Meyers says her modernist, minimalist designs "create spiritual places that put you in direct contact with nature."

Finding a way to do that in urban spaces like Battery Park City or a 1,600-square-foot urban loft in midtown Manhattan may seem impossible, and that's why her work has won so many architectural awards.  The firm's latest concept, a 60,000-square-foot community center near Ground Zero, is being designed as a platinum LEED-certified building – the highest designation of environmentally sustainable construction – and will manifest Meyers' design goal.  The community center, which is slated for completion in July 2012, boasts a 500-foot-long "Wall of Light" that will pour natural light into all of the building's primary spaces.  A preliminary plan also calls for music, based on water, in a piece composed by friend and collaborator, Michael Schumacher.  The glass wall will "reach out to the rest of the environment in a very vocal way that says this is a part of what we need to be as a civilization," Meyers says.  "Maybe clean water, or a bird species is more important than having 24 different jackets, each of which is disposable at the end of the season."

View the complete issue of Arrive here.

See more from hMa at hanrahanmeyers.com .