Richard Meier has large hands that seem to always be in motion.

At first glance, one might think they were those of a pugilist or someone used to manual labor, rather than those of a celebrated architect – he was the youngest to ever receive his profession’s highest award, the Pritzker Prize.

It’s easy to imagine him raising buildings, wearing a hardhat, his tall frame dominating the site. It’s easy to imagine him giving orders in his baritone. It’s easy to imagine him framed against steel girders and cranes of the edifices, museums, and homes he’s built around the world.

It’s not so easy to picture Mr. Meier making sketches with a slim pencil (“Draughting 02237,” manufactured by the Sanford Corporation) in a white cubic space approximately 18 feet by 18 feet by 18 feet, with floor-to-ceiling windows on the east-facing wall and floor-to-ceiling books on the west wall.

But this is indeed where Mr. Meier works, in a quiet office on Tenth Avenue that’s furnished with an 11 foot by 3 foot-10.5 inch white lacquer table and six Josef Hoffmann armchairs.

“It’s a long way from where I started,” Mr. Meier said. “I’ve always felt lucky that I chose this career.”

He made the choice early, growing up as the oldest of three sons of Jerome and Carolyn Meier in Maplewood, N.J. One day, when a young Mr. Meier was about 10, a family friend asked, “What are you going to do when you grow up?”

“I’m going to be an architect,” he replied.

Fast forward 60 years.

“How did you know you wanted to be an architect?” the reporter asked.

“I liked to make things – you know, toy boats, little models,” Mr. Meier said. “But did I know back then what an architect was? Of course not.”

He studied architecture at Cornell University, although his father – a civil engineer who became a wholesale wine and liquor salesman – wanted him to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Mr. Meier had also won admission.

“Architecture, like any field, requires total focus, relentless hard work, which is what I did at Cornell,” Mr. Meier said.

Hard work wasn’t an alien concept for him. During his school days, he drove Good Humor ice cream trucks. He scrubbed floors at an architect’s office in Newark, eager to learn the craft but disappointed to find that none of the professionals seemed willing to mentor him. After graduation from Cornell, he traveled to Israel, Greece, Germany, France, Denmark, Finland, and Italy, among other places, to meet architects.

One of them was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, the Swiss-born architect who adopted the name of his maternal grandfather, Le Corbusier, and became a legend of his time. Mr. Meier tried repeatedly to see him but was turned down by Le Corbusier’s assistant.

One morning, Le Corbusier was to attend the inauguration of Maison du Brasil, a building he’d designed at the University of Paris. Mr. Meier found himself next to the great man, as both waited for the ceremonies to commence. Naturally, Mr. Meier asked if he could work with him.

“No” was Le Corbusier’s immediate answer; he never employed Americans.

“Why?” Mr. Meier asked.

Because no American museum had exhibited his works, Le Corbusier said. New York’s Museum of Modern Art canceled his show in 1938, rescheduled it for 1945, and canceled it again.

And so, no job for Mr. Meier in Paris.

But there were jobs in New York. Marcel Breuer became a mentor. One employer was the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Its pre-eminent figure and the creator of the landmark Lever House, Gordon Bunshaft, took a liking to him and predicted Mr. Meier would flourish at the firm.

“But after six months, I found that I didn’t want to work in a corporate environment,” Mr. Meier recalled.

He tendered his resignation.

“You’re crazy,” Bunshaft said. “Why leave now?”

Mr. Meier left to set up his own shop in 1963. It was a two-room walk-up on Park Avenue and 91st Street, where he also lived. He set up an easel for painting. His oak-colored butcher block dining table doubled as his work station.

From that station flowed designs for dozens of projects. One of his earliest was an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Recent American Synagogue Architecture.” Another was Lambert House on Fire Island, whose owner wanted it built for $9,000.

To keep to that budget, Mr. Meier bought collapsible wood frames from a Midwestern company that also produced material for log cabins.

“I slept on the beach for nine days,” he said. “But I got that house built for $9,000.”

In view of his subsequent accomplishments – the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum fur Kunsthandwerk in Frankfurt, and the Westbeth Artists Community, 173/176 Perry Street, 165 Charles Street in New York, among others – that house on the beach now seems a metaphor for Mr. Meier’s methodology.

“I concentrate on getting to the next stage in any project,” he said. “My concern is with getting things built.”

That house on Fire Island also hinted at what would become Mr. Meier’s style.

“I’ve always emphasized openness, transparency, rigor of expression,” he said. “Fundamentally, my meditations are on space, form, light, and how to make them.The goal is presence, not illusion, and this I pursue with unrelenting vigor, for I believe that this is the heart and soul of architecture.

“Mine is a preoccupation with light and space – not abstract space, not scaleless space, but space whose order and definition are related to light, to human scale, and to the culture of architecture,” he said.

“I work with volume and surface, manipulating forms in light, changes of scale and view, movement and stasis.”

His favorite color?

“White,” Mr. Meier said. “Whiteness has been one means of sharpening perception and heightening the power of visual form.”

White will likely feature in his forthcoming projects, including Sheldon Solow’s East River master plan, part of a four-parcel property between 35th and 41st streets along the FDR Drive, just south of the United Nations. Mr. Meier is collaborating with David Childs and Marilyn Taylor of Skidmore Owings.

Of all his works, is there one that is closest to his heart?

“The house that I built for my parents in Essex Fells, New Jersey,” Mr. Meier said. “It gave them enormous pleasure. And it significantly changed my relationship with my father. He was always an inward-looking man, someone who rarely expressed emotion. But when he saw that house, I knew how proud he felt that I was his son. And that made me very proud.”