Museum Architect Blends Structure to Scene, Vice Versa

Several years ago, when architect Richard Meier first saw the massive and shapeless hill in Los Angeles where the new J. Paul Getty Museum, conservation institute, and research and education centers were to be built, he was dumbfounded. “My God,” he remembers thinking, “where do you begin?”

Telling the story Thursday night at UC Irvine, in the first of a four-part series of lectures on contemporary museum architecture, Meier recalled that the developer who owned the Getty site used to amuse himself on Sundays by moving the land around with a bulldozer.

“At least you couldn’t say the topography was sacred,” he remarked, drawing laughter from a capacity audience composed largely of fellow architects.

Meier had spent the preceding 45 minutes discussing his goals in architecture: “To find and to redefine a sense of order, to understand a relationship between what has been and what can be” and to create “a basic dialogue between public and private spaces.”

Meier’s stress on purity, clarity and the importance of context--physical, historical and social--brought him his first acclaim as a designer of private homes in the 1960s, and he has remained true to that vision.

Museums, he explained, involve a series of relationships: between the individual viewer and the individual object, between light and the object, between light and space, between art and its surroundings, and between the building and its surroundings.

When he was commissioned to design a new home for the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, he envisioned the building as a series of public spaces. Located on a major artery (where pedestrians emerge from the subway to walk to nearby suburban areas) and serving as a major cultural symbol (the city has no other art museum), the building would have a strong social function, he believed.

So his plan allowed for people to approach the building from several different directions and to congregate in the large central atrium, which is often rented out for receptions.

The museum’s organization also allows for an ever-changing relationship of the viewer to the art. “The best way to see a work of art is not just on a one-to-one basis,” Meier said. “You should be able to move away and see it from a different perspective and in relationship to the other works of art.”

High Museum viewers move along a ramp around the atrium to view the art, and windows allow them to take a breather by looking outdoors (“There’s nothing worse,” Meier said, “than never having the ability to look out”).

But unlike the spiraling interior of the Guggenheim Museum in New York--which has long been criticized for the way its sloping floors, ceilings and walls interfere with the experience of looking at art--at the High Museum, the works are hung in galleries separate from the ramp.

In Frankfurt, West Germany, Meier encountered trickier problems in creating an addition to the Museum fur Kunsthandwerk, a craft museum housed in a structure built in 1803 and in an area where seven other museums were located.

The museum’s display needs obliged him to create an addition roughly nine times the size of the original building. (As he said jokingly, “It was hard to say which was attached to which.”) In addition, there were numerous trees on the property that he was not permitted to move.

But Meier figured out a way to make his building relate to the structure 160 years its senior by retaining its basic proportions in such essential details as the size of windows. And the trees became vital elements in the design, with courtyards “cut out” of the building here and there to allow the leafy giants to flourish. Situated near a residential area and next to a park, the museum is “a place to move through, part of daily life,” Meier suggested.

The lonely, chaparral-covered Getty site was entirely different, however. It offered no enjoyably knotty problems of how to relate a new design to older designs. In fact, it seemed to offer no context at all.

But it had some great views. And it did relate to one very prominent object: the San Diego Freeway, the brightest source of light at night.

Meier noticed that one of the two pronounced ridges on the site is parallel to the freeway while the other just happens to be parallel to a 22 1/2-degree bend that the freeway takes as it goes north. So he decided to let the San Diego Freeway become the organizing device for the cluster of buildings that will make up the Getty enclave.

In this way Meier--whose firm, Richard Meier & Partners, has both New York and Los Angeles offices--gave the plan a uniquely L.A. twist, completely in keeping with his great concern for context.

The “public” side of the complex, where the new museum will be, overlooks downtown Los Angeles, while the “private” side, which will house research areas, overlooks the ocean. Meier said he will retain the easy passage from inside to outside of the present Getty museum in Malibu, which has airy courtyards reconstructed from a Roman villa.

Delivered in an easygoing, friendly style, Meier’s talk nevertheless was a strong indication of the exacting passions of an architect whose work involves “the exercise of individual will and intellect (to extract) from our culture the timeless and the topical.”

The “Artwork or Containers: Issues in Contemporary Museum Architecture” lecture series continues Feb. 23 at 7:30 p.m. with speaker Ricardo Legorreta of Mexico City. The series is being sponsored by the Newport Harbor Art Museum and the Architecture Foundation of Orange County in the Main Lecture Hall of the Nelson Research Building, UC Irvine. Admission: $15 per lecture, reservations recommended. Information: (714) 557-7769. ‘The best way to see a work of art is not just on a one-to-one basis (but) in relationship to the other works of art.’

Architect Richard Meier