The organisation - organizations forming the project program of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, CA

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 1998 by Ivor Richards

'In my opinion, an individual without any love of the arts cannot be considered completely civilized. At the same time, it is extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible, to interest people in works of art unless they can see them and know something about them.' J. Paul Getty, 1965

These remarks are the foundation of both the Getty Center as a whole, and the J. Paul Getty Museum that it now houses. In addition five other programmes, which focus on scholarship, conservation and education, occupy the other buildings within the hilltop citadel. Within the overall complex, the distinct and different forms of the museum, clustered around its courtyard, and the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, are the two major elements from which the design springs.

Both the original museum, in Getty's own Ranch House (circa 1952), and the later Roman Villa Museum (circa 1974), are sited in Malibu, and in common with Richard Meier's Getty Center (1997) in Brentwood, have vistas over the Pacific Ocean. Of these, the spectacular prospects of the latter are the crowning magnificence uniting art, nature and the city of Los Angeles.

John Walsh, director of the Getty Museum, explains in his introduction to the Getty collections - which now include antiquities, manuscripts, paintings, drawings, decorative arts, sculpture and works of art and photographs- the unparalleled expansion and improvement in these artistic areas '... that could not have been imagined when [the Getty Ranch House Museum] first opened in 1954, or even when the [Roman] Villa building opened in 1974. Since the early 1980s, hundreds of important new works of art have been acquired in the areas of the museum's three traditional interests, antiquities, French furniture and decorative arts, and European paintings, and thousands more have been acquired to form four new collections ...', and Walsh concludes." ... The works of art ... were brought to Los Angeles for the joy and enlightenment of the public'.(1)

Mission statement

This great cultural, artistic and social mission would never have been possible without the fabulous wealth of J. Paul Getty: 'At his death in June 1976, Getty bequeathed four million shares of Getty Oil stock worth about $700 million to his museum (the Roman Villa in Malibu), leaving it to the trustees' discretion to decide how the legacy should best be used. Although the assets would be tied up in the courts for some time to come, the collections grew impressively in the first years after he died through the receipt of Getty's private collection from Sutton Place (in Surrey, England) and some purchases ... By April 1982, with the receipt of the proceeds of Getty's estate, the Trust already had begun to prepare for its transformation from a small museum into a visual arts institution of international significance. Realizing that the new income represented an unparalleled opportunity to expand upon Getty's initial vision, Harold Williams (appointed as President and Chief Executive Officer of the J. Paul Getty Trust in 1981) and the trustees moved to set up other organizations that could operate in tandem with the Getty Museum in furtherance of Getty's mandate for: "the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge"?

These organizations included the Getty Research Institute, the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Information Institute, the Getty Education Institute for the Arts and the Getty Grant Program. To this has been subsequently added the Getty Leaderships Institute for Museum Management.

With the Museum itself, these Institutes and Getty's vast bequest form respectively the project programme and funding source for the Getty Center, which Richard Meier designed and built over some 13 years between 1984 and 1997.

THE GETTY CENTER, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA ARCHITECT RICHARD MEIER & PARTNERS, ARCHITECTS

When Meier himself first assessed the likely timeframe as 10 years, he could not possibly have perceived that this project could take even longer and culminate at a global cost of $1 billion, the official Getty figure, in December 1997.

Apart from the magnificent museum galleries, with the museum director and staff, the two institutions that most support the art and scholarship are the Conservation Institute and the Research Institute, with their activities concentrated at the Getty Center, within the Meier citadel.

Vectors

In describing the creation of the architectural project in the documentary film, Concert of Wills: Making the Getty Center, Meier - actively drawing the initial site plans - first defined the very limited area of the site that could receive the buildings, by delineating the contour encirclement in red. He then drew what he defined as 'the two major vectors' arising from the two principal ridges of the land-form. One vector, or axis, is normal to the LA grid and carried the centre-line of the museums clustered on the periphery of their courtyard. The other vector, deflected 22 1/2 degrees from the north-south axis, carries the centroid of the Research Institute. This geometry and placement of the two major elements of form, creates a third - the fan form of external space which receives the terraced Italianate garden, of Meier's early projects, terminating in a colonnaded breezeway whose crucial geometrical line unites the west pavilion of the museum cluster, with the Scholars Pavilion of the Research Institute. This in turn was followed by an amphitheatre which echoed the lower arroyo.