Malibu and a Villa: the Getty Museum's original building, recently reopened and now exclusively dedicated to the antiquities collection, benefits from a sensitive renovation and augmented surroundings that enhance its aura of the Classical past

Critics have long panned the Getty Villa in Malibu as the bagatelle of a rich man suffering a delusional overdose of megalomania. But 30 years after the building opened to mixed reviews, it's time to look again: with a transformative addition and renovation by Boston architects Machado and Silvetti Associates, this re-creation of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum has been recast as the core idea in an expanded cultural precinct. We now look with different eyes at the whole daffy enterprise of a replicated Roman villa on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. The architects have rooted the villa in a beautiful, explanatory and highly literate context that lends authenticity to this improbable fantasy.

J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) thought he was the reincarnation of a Roman emperor, and what becomes a latter-day emperor better than a resurrected villa? But the eccentric billionaire was famously tightfisted, and he shortchanged the project, finished in 1973, on visitor amenities. In 1994, the Getty commissioned the Boston architects to renovate the structure and design what Italians call the contorni--the side dishes--which have become expected in today's museums: the bookstore, cafe and theaters, plus that sine qua non in Los Angeles, garage space.

After parking in the new three-story facility, visitors quickly shed the 21st century as they embark on a journey through a built landscape terraced into the side of the 64-acre ravine. Because they can't see the museum entrance or anticipate the path, the promenade carries an air of mystery. If the villa as originally designed was a self-sufficient object in the landscape, the architects have now provided an unfolding experience in a sequence of gardens. The point of entry is a monumental travertine staircase threading its way up to a terrace that overlooks the formal peristyle garden behind the villa. Another staircase takes a path notched into the hillside, winding episodically forward, past groves of olive trees and fragrant Mediterranean plants, allowing a continuous overview of the villa's polychromed facades. Finally, the path angles to another terrace offering a full view of the colonnaded two-story entrance portico, which formerly was partly blocked by the encroaching slopes of the ravine. With masterful boldness, the architects have opened the space in front of the facade, carving out a 450-seat semicircular theater whose terraced seating buttresses the excavated hillside. The villa's portico now does double duty as museum entrance and proscenium stage for the theater.

The new approach is not only dramatic, but corrective. Previously, guests parked underground, beneath the peristyle garden adjoining the rear of the villa, climbed up an enclosed staircase and landed abruptly in the back garden, suddenly plunging into antiquity as though into a cold bath. They then walked to the rear of the villa and entered through its back door: once inside, they were swimming upstream, against the flow of the layout. The new path corrects the muddle so that visitors now enter the villa as intended by its floor plan.

Before approaching the museum, a visitor may be tempted to continue exploring the newly configured outdoor precincts, moving over the shoulder of the theater to the bookstore and then to the cafe above it, housed in a pavilion that hybridizes Classical and modern architecture (the two traditions here seem close). The columns supporting the steel roof beam of the dining terrace echo the columns supporting horizontal beams in the portico of the villa opposite. The new concrete columns, however, are more widely spaced because of the steel beam--and more lively, separated as they are by irregular intervals. But the new colonnade couples visually with the villa's portico, forming a civic space reminiscent of the Greek agora or the Roman forum.

Beyond the dining plaza, in new structures dedicated to art conservation, the architects expand their thesis on the close relationship between modernism and Classicism with a brief, teasing disquisition: their built essay comments on the traditional issue of how columns engage walls, as the columns and walls switch roles as structural support.

The Romans were advocates of the urban grid. The Villa dei Papiri has an underlying grid, but as Machado and Silvetti extend the precinct of the villa into the recalcitrant hillscape, geometric regularity cedes to organic contours, and their strategy of capturing buildable space inspires the metaphor of excavation and archeology--visual ideas that imply the layering of time in general, and here, specifically, the narrative of an ancient villa recovered from the Vesuvian ash.

The architects used the metaphor as a disciplining theme and ordering principle, and the metaphor led to the idea of layering the site in strata of materials distinct from one another. Some retaining walls are cast in highly textured concrete, and some covered in a crusty travertine that alludes to Rome via Richard Meier's Getty Center in Brentwood. Others are covered in dressed stone. In a tour de force, the architects used almost 20 different types and mixes of concrete, which in itself is an exercise in historical memory, as the Romans were the first to use concrete extensively. The architects chose a warm palette of hues with a rose blush--even the stone aggregate is an earthy pink--that somehow adds an aura of age to the construction.