Getty genesis - planning the architectural design of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 1998 by Ivor Richards

For Richard Meier, the Getty Center has been a passion. The realization of such a massive and significant project for the arts, over a passage of almost 14 years, is rare in the history of architecture itself.

In global terms, three super-projects have both signalled the culmination of the 1990s and heralded the millennium; these are the recently completed Tokyo International Forum in Japan by Rafael Vinoly (AR November 1996), the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry (AR December 1997), and the Getty Center by Richard Meier.(1) These three, all with different programmes and city contexts, also represent a new order of civic achievement, supported by extraordinary design development and construction budgets emanating from exceptional ambitious clients and institutions. All three represent intense collaboration between architects and design teams, clients and programme co-ordinators, contractors, material fabricators and suppliers. Three books have already been written about the design and realization of the Getty Center.(2)

In Richard Meier's work as a whole, there are several precedents. First, in the realm of forms, is the subliminal presence of two earlier Meier museum commissions, most notably the Frankfurt Museum for the Decorative Arts (AR November 1985), and to a lesser degree, the Atlanta High Museum of Art (AR February 1984). Both exhibit Meier's most successful manipulation of the cubistic museum or gallery space, with separated public circulation in ramp-halls. In the Frankfurt case, the development of a quadripartite plan, with major museum-spaces occupying a four-bay square of a 16bay overall plan, first established the notion of a regulated cube (in that instance side-lit with windows) as the basis for the parti, and a sustainable human-scaled 'villa' experience. This principle is extended, in artificially-lit galleries, at Atlanta. In the Getty Museum, the cubistic format emerges again from the outset, with a unit of space known to Meier and his client, as 'the Dulwich'(3) - a cubic naturally top-lit gallery form coupled into a nine-bay or four-bay square plan. These squares then form the basis of the museum clusters organised around a major patio and are interspersed with atria and external terraces - the principal innovation of the Meier Californian museum typology. Meier's sketches and models demonstrate these geometrical principles from the earliest proposals, through to the final design itself.

The second precedent in Meier's earlier work is found in the European projects, and within his researches into generators of ensembles from the geometrical and historical layers of the urban site plan.(4) This process is first shown in the Frankfurt Museum (1979-1985), where the fundamental geometrical formation of the site plan is governed by both the cubic Villa Metzler and the 3 1/2 degree shift in the urban boundaries of the museum park on the banks of the Main. From this foundation, Meier goes on to use similar techniques of site analysis and geometrical guidelines, taken from forces within the site plan itself in Ulm, the Hague and Barcelona, among others.

The mountain-top site of the Getty provides for Meier a perfect opportunity to unite the inherent geometries of both landscape and urban grid of Los Angeles itself, as it lies below the elevated Getty citadel with its vistas to mountains, city and ocean.

Richard Meier's personal description confirms his method and priorities, as applied to the overall design: 'The Getty Center takes its form from the opportunities and constraints of a magnificent hilltop site. Just off the San Diego Freeway in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, the site is immediately accessible to the flow of urban life and yet slightly removed from the city. The hilltop offers panoramic views of the ocean and mountains, but it also overlooks the geometry of Los Angeles, which is spread like a vast, elegant carpet below the rugged terrain.

'In choosing how to organize the buildings, landscaping, and open spaces, I deferred to the site's topography. There are two natural ridges - one lines up with the street grid of Los Angeles and the second with the [22 1/2 degree geometrical] swing of the San Diego Freeway as it turns north through the Sepulveda Pass. The buildings form axes along these two ridges.

'... It is 30 years since I last visited the Acropolis in Athens, but who could not be inspired by some of the ideas - of procession, circulation and movement - that are expressed there? Another analogy that has been made [of the Getty] in terms of formal relationships is Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli.(5) Clearly there is no physical resemblance in the architecture, but again it is in the formal concepts - here of asymmetry and surprise, and of the long walls that extend into the landscape relating built form to nature. Another, more modern tradition - that of the Southern California houses of Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright - can be recalled in the Center's sense of openness and crisp horizontality.