Michael Meredith Hare was born January 7, 1909 to Montgomery Hare and Constance Parsons Hare in New York City. He attended Groton School from 1921 to 1927. He entered Yale College in 1927 and transferred to the department of architecture in 1929. Following a leave of absence to study architecture in France in 1931, Hare returned to Yale in 1933 to complete his degree. But Paris had changed him:

[H]e was completely out of sympathy with the philosophy then prevalent at that school. In Paris, Mr. Hare had become converted to the Contemporary viewpoint, quite different from that held at Yale, through the good offices of the now Chicago architect, William Deknatel, who had formerly been a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Both then and today Mr. Hare has differed seriously with the philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright, but despite the differences this influence acted as a breath of fresh air." [quoted from Michael Hare's autobiographical statement, 1940]

Hare was asked to leave Yale and he completed his degree at Columbia in 1935. He was a Special Consultant to the Board of Design for the New York World's Fair in 1939 where he pushed for the Fair to be contemporary rather than colonial. His theme, "The Fair of the Future", was modified to "The World of Tomorrow." He practiced as an architect until 1956 when began to devote himself full time to philosophy. He died in 1968.