TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102191/1021430.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                DESIGN, Page 100

A Grand New Getty


Architect Richard Meier's model for a sprawling art center shows
there's lots of verve left in American modernism

By KURT ANDERSEN -- Reported by Daniel S. Levy/New York


    American architecture has spent the past few years in the
dumps, fretful and feckless. Aesthetically, there is neither
invigorating ferment nor much consensus, and the collapse of
both the housing and commercial real estate markets means that
even big-name architects have precious little to do right now.
So when Richard Meier's final designs for the J. Paul Getty
Trust's vast art center, a $360 million, six-building
museum-and-art-scholarship wonderland, were unveiled in Los
Angeles last week, it wasn't just his envious peers who paid
attention. Meier won the commission over 32 fellow architectural
stars (including Charles Moore, Frank Gehry and Robert Venturi)
back in 1984, and given the prominence of the project and the
deep-pocket client, every year the architect spent tweaking his
design only raised the stakes higher. "Architecture," said Meier
on the eve of the debut of the most important work of his
career, "takes a long time."

    The Getty Center has been called the commission of the
century, and for once that may not be hyperbole. The project
includes a sprawling museum containing everything from an 18th
century French corner cupboard made for the head of the Polish
army to Van Gogh's Irises; a spacious, circular loft building,
where art scholars can think and write, mingle and argue; a
separate building devoted to harnessing computers on behalf of
art-historical truth; an auditorium; a restaurant; and a huge
state-of-the-art facility for conservators. All this will be set
amid gardens and fountains on a positively Olympian site -- 110
acres abutting the Brentwood neighborhood, on a hill just half
a mile north of Sunset Boulevard -- with panoramas to die for.
"You can see downtown, you can see UCLA, Century City, Santa
Monica and the ocean," says Meier, who has lived half the time
in a house on the site since 1986.

    The project's scale, ambition and high-mindedness --
portentousness even -- are a throwback to a time when the
cultural mission was clear, thinking was big, and budgets were
gigantic. But then Meier, 57, is rather gloriously anachronistic
-- and high-minded and portentous -- himself. While most of his
peers have spent the past two decades feverishly inventing (or
capitulating to) a sometimes gimcrack neo-neoclassicism, Meier
has remained an unrepentant circa-1927 Corbusian -- modernism's
last best heir. "I don't think you change your values every day
or every time you do a new building," he says. "If you are
worried about style or what is the trend of the moment, you are
in trouble."

    Meier's architecture is cool and impeccable, deluxe
abstract collages of interlocking white-metal-clad boxes and
curved white-metal-clad walls, with nothing but dark punched
windows and steel stair rails for exterior ornament. It is
architecture for the 21st century as imagined in the early 20th
century. There are no diversionary pediments and keystones, only
suave geometries and rigorous details. His best-known work has
been relatively small-scale zillionaires' villas and a few
museums.

    Happily, although the Getty complex will contain as much
floor space as a skyscraper, Meier has scattered its nearly 1
million sq. ft. among six sharply distinct buildings, none
taller than five stories. The largest is the museum, which is,
in turn, broken up into five pavilions set around a 1 1/2-acre
garden courtyard, interconnected by walkways, some open air. The
arrangement means that a visitor's tour will be punctuated by
blasts of California blue sky and sunlight: Rembrandt and
Ruisdael landscapes interspersed with real-life Pacific vistas.

    The one part of the Getty that diverges somewhat from
Meier's earlier work is the Center for the History of Art and
the Humanities, the intellectual core of the enterprise. Frank
Lloyd Wright is one of the gods from whom Meier claims stylistic
influence, and the basic form of this building -- a five-story
cylinder whose salient interior feature is a broad ramp that
follows the building's curve as it descends -- suggests Wright's
Guggenheim Museum with the sides straightened and one large
slice of the layer cake removed.

    Overall, the stucco and cleft-cut stone will give the
Getty a nice grittiness lacking in Meier's previous work.
Instead of the usual aloof Meieresque facades, the buildings are
full of verve; they are even a bit manic. Instead of sleek
uninterrupted planes of metal and glass, there are balconies,
loggias and shady brise-soleils. If the new Getty becomes a
lively, civilized place, it will be because, for all the
white-on-white elegance, it is not pristine and hermetic, not
another gorgeous monolith. The rugged terrain and Meier's good
planning sense have dictated a dense urban messiness, with odd
angles and almost ungainly juxtapositions, rather than some
prissy classical grid over which buildings as jewels are
dispersed just so.

    Construction begins on the main complex next spring, and
Meier, whose architecture depends on precision detailing, will
have to be especially vigilant about the quality of the
Southern California craft: Taco Bell stuccowork won't do. But
considering the budget and Meier's habitual perfectionism, it
looks as if the Getty Center, when finished in 1996, will have
justified all the fuss.