$300-Million Brentwood Project : Getty Center Challenges a Premier U.S. Architect

Richard Meier sits at a white lacquered table in a light-filled office in Westwood with unadorned white walls. His white shirt matches his collar-length white hair. The bookshelves and telephone are white, as is the single carnation peeking out from a bud vase.

Perhaps the world’s leading architect, Meier is--not surprisingly--famous for gleaming white buildings covered with porcelain panels. He is also celebrated for making light bend in unusual and interesting ways, for structures that appear to have been dropped from a helicopter into the surrounding landscape and for a formal approach that has won him many more admirers in Europe than in California.

Yet for more than four years now, the New York-based Meier, 54, has been reinventing himself as he tackles what some have called the architectural commission of the century: five buildings that will sprout from a 742-acre chaparral-studded hill above Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood with a panoramic mountain-to-ocean view.

The $300-million J. Paul Getty Center, which will include a museum, a conservation institute and a library and research facility for art historians, will not bear any of Meier’s signature features--in part because of the demands of the client, in part because of the demands of a neighborhood that imposed 107 conditions on the project.

Despite obstacles that often seem “arbitrary” to him, Meier exudes confidence about his assignment, which he has compared to designing the Acropolis. The new Getty museum, he asserted in a recent interview, “will be the foremost tourist attraction in Los Angeles.”

“I think it’s going to be rather an exciting museum to visit, both in terms of what’s displayed but also in terms of how it’s displayed and the quality of the spaces as you go through . . . ,” he said. “I think people will come here also to see Los Angeles. You have a sense of the city--a sense of the breadth of it, a sense of the expanse of it, from the desert to the sea--that you don’t have as you go from one place to another by car.”

The blueprints for the college campus-style complex will not be finished until next year, and the museum is not scheduled to open until 1995, four years after the originally announced completion date. But construction will start this summer on the underground parking garage at the base of the hillside.

In many ways, the Getty commission has been endlessly frustrating for the blunt and prickly Meier, a tall, ruddy-complexioned man who wears the round-framed spectacles popular with architects. “Every time you turn around there’s someone there saying, ‘You can’t do that,’ ” he said, referring to the restrictions won by the Brentwood Homeowners Assn. on everything from setbacks to sight lines to building height.

In others respects, however, the unique endeavor has afforded luxuries that most architects can only dream of--trips to Europe with Getty Trust officials to inspect villas, gardens, museums and hill towns and the chance to examine samples of stone from “every quarry in the world.” For the first year after he was hired, he did not even have to pick up a pencil.

For the two weeks each month when he is in Los Angeles, Meier has had the opportunity to live atop the hill itself, in a brown wood-frame house that will eventually be torn down.

He has spent many hours hiking on the rugged site with his personal trainer and observing not only changes in the quality of the light but also “the sounds, smells, things that are going on all around that affect your experience of being on the hillside.”

The complex will bring together most of the components of the Getty Trust, a nonprofit foundation established by the oil magnate, who died in 1982, to foster the visual arts and related fields. The trust has a $3-billion endowment, by far the biggest in the art world.

Only the auditorium, restaurants and the museum, which will house paintings, photographs, drawings, illuminated manuscripts and decorative objects (the antiquities will remain at the original museum in Malibu), will be open to the public.

The project has posed enormous challenges, and not just because of the restrictions. Meier, who oversees 20 architects working exclusively on the new Getty project, must accommodate the needs of programs that have not yet finished defining themselves.

He must create buildings of architectural distinction that will not do violence to their dramatic natural surroundings. And he must design a museum that will draw people to the artworks without competing with or overwhelming them.

John Walsh Jr., director of the Getty Museum, said a museum building and its collection should relate to one another as an accompanist does to a singer. “The accompanist plays a subtle and important part in emphasizing and setting off the words and music, and sometimes has solo passages, and that’s great,” Walsh said. “But if ever the accompanist drowns out the singer, you know it’s going to be trouble.”

The likelihood that Meier, who nearly pursued a career in painting instead of architecture, would be able “to some extent to subordinate the building to the art” was one reason he was chosen in 1984 after a highly publicized 18-month search, according to Stephen D. Rountree, director of the building program.

Meier had just won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, and had recently designed two widely praised art institutions--the High Museum in Atlanta and the Museum for the Decorative Arts in Frankfurt, West Germany. Both buildings reflect the influence of Le Corbusier, a dominant figure of the post-World War I era whose passion for the simplicity and purity of white cubes helped define the International Style.

Born in Newark, N.J., and educated at Cornell University, Meier had never built anything in California.

Some authorities on local architecture were skeptical about Meier’s selection and questioned whether he could adapt to the special characteristics of Southern California. “He has a set form, whether it’s in the United States or Europe,” said David Gebhard, professor at UC Santa Barbara and co-author of “Architecture in Los Angeles.” “It’s the same old thing.”

But Getty officials say it did not trouble them that Meier’s previous museums were not exactly what they had in mind. For example, they believe older paintings look best when lit from above rather than from the side, Meier-style.

Walsh recalled how the issue was broached with Meier:

“We said at the outset: ‘You make wonderful buildings of a certain type, but those materials and forms aren’t going to suit a collection of older art or sit very well in that landscape.’

“He (Meier) said, ‘I know. That’s what’s so interesting about this job.’ ”

Hired at an unusually early stage of the project, Meier spent the first year watching closely and asking questions as the Getty Trust formulated and refined its programs--an evolutionary process that is still going on.

Other extravagances included two European trips in the company of top Getty officials. The group drew inspiration from some of the sights they visited, such as the monastery, Certosa del Galluzza, near Florence, whose buildings and courtyards seemed of a scale that would suit the Getty. Arriving at the Villa D’Este outside Rome on a hot summer day, the Getty officials were impressed by how the fountains appeared to cool the air and resolved to provide the same relief in Brentwood.

“Everyone said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful what the water does in terms of making you feel that it’s not so hot?’ ” Meier said. “If we had sat around the table and tried to discuss that, it would not have had the same effect.”

Even now that the project is in what is known as the “design development phase”--meaning that plans are being negotiated room by room--the field trips continue. As recently as last month Meier, Walsh and Rountree visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a favorite of Walsh’s, to study the way fabric is used on the walls.

Getty officials say the trips have enhanced communication between architect and client. But Meier has remained closed-mouthed about some of his thinking, including the type of stone he is contemplating for the building exteriors.

“I wish we knew more about it than we do . . . ,” Rountree said. “It’s one of those things where artistically he isn’t showing us much. He feels that it’s not yet time.”

What has been disclosed is that the five buildings, with 400,000 square feet of space, will be located in a kind of wishbone configuration on two ridges that--to Meier’s delight--run along the same axis as the San Diego Freeway below.

The museum will be on the eastern ridge and visible from the freeway. Adjacent to it will be the Conservation Institute and other offices.

On the western side, and shielded from view, will be the Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the research facility for scholars. The buildings will be connected underground.

“It’s like taking away the hillside . . . and then rebuilding the hillside with buildings,” Meier said. “When you perceive the Getty you (won’t) see it as this monolithic object up there on top of the hill but rather as a series of small entities.”

Visitors will be whisked to the top of the hill by an electric tram that will take four minutes to travel the three-quarter-mile route.

Once they arrive at the museum--five two-story clusters--Meier wants them to have an experience quite unlike what they get at the Museum of Contemporary Art or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Most museums tend to be “hermetically sealed” and disorienting, he believes, but in Brentwood, as at the Getty Museum in Malibu, visitors will not simply be “looking at painting after painting after painting” but will travel back and forth between the courtyards, gardens and galleries.

Such integration of building with landscape is something of a novelty for Meier, who, despite his professed admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright, is known for creating structures that “seem to stand free of the land,” as architectural historian Esther McCoy put it.

Describing his Douglas house in a wooded area of Northern Michigan, Meier once told an interviewer that it was “built as though dropped by helicopter, so that even the trees within six inches of its base haven’t been touched.”

Emmet L. Wemple, who landscaped the Malibu facility, is in charge of the even more massive landscaping project in Brentwood, where thousands of trees and shrubs are being planted, with an emphasis wherever possible on such natural vegetation as chaparral, live oak and sycamore. Whether palm trees will be included is one of the questions still being debated, Wemple said.

Meier, the kind of administrator who sees “every piece of paper” that enters or leaves his office, clearly intends to maintain control over the landscape design. But it will be Wemple’s task to “make the kind of environment that I’m talking about happen,” the architect said.

As for the interiors, Meier and his staff are gathering information from Getty employees--more than 600 people will work in Brentwood--so they can painstakingly plan each space, giving the clients what they want while remaining true to the architectural vision. The details will not be final until next year, he said.

To provide flexible conservation laboratories that will not quickly become obsolete, for example, Meier had to learn about the processes involved and anticipate technological developments, said Luis Monreal, director of the Getty’s Conservation Institute, now temporarily located in Marina del Rey.

What Meier came up with, Monreal said, are empty modular spaces--almost like a theater--”that can change as the technology changes.”

“He is not a compromiser,” Monreal said. “He knows the things that are uncompromisable, if there is such a word, because they will be detrimental for the quality of his architecture.”

Although the Getty originally announced that construction of the project would begin in 1987, Meier is unperturbed by the delay. By his estimate, he said, the project was always slated to take 10 years.

Negotiations with the neighbors and with the California Transportation Department, which owns much of the nearby land, have slowed the project, and original projections failed to take into account the period that the Getty would need to develop its programs, according to Rountree.

Given the wealth of the Getty Trust, one might imagine that Meier is working with limitless funds, but Rountree maintains he is on a tight budget. As an economy measure, Rountree was forced to “shrink the entire project” by 10% to 12%--what he describes as a “Xerox reduction.”

Another cost-saving will come in not allowing Meier to design all of the furniture, as is his custom. “You’ll see gallery benches designed by Richard Meier, but you won’t see secretarial desks (and) you won’t see your chair designed by Richard Meier,” Rountree said.

Told about Rountree’s comment, Meier snapped, “Why is that?” Then he added, smiling: “We’ll have to wait and see.”

Involved as he is in the Getty project, it does not occupy all of Meier’s attention. He is designing a museum of contemporary art in Barcelona, for example--a very different task because the facility will be hemmed in by urban buildings.

He was invited to compete for the design of a huge $1-billion library in Paris; the preliminary proposals are due in July. Though the size and cost of the library might seem to dwarf the Getty, Meier maintained that it will not be as important to Paris “as this institution will be to Los Angeles.”

Meier, who is divorced and the father of two young children, is also spending some of his time learning about Los Angeles, since he expects to keep his Westwood office open after the Getty is completed.

He is continually exploring new neighborhoods--Monterey Park was a recent discovery--and was surprised to find that the movie industry is not as predominant as it seems from afar. He is puzzled that Los Angeles residents seem so preoccupied with fashionable restaurants.

“The best thing would be having a restaurant in a tent,” he said. “When that location is no longer popular, you move on.”

He has brooded about whether the Getty Center should have been located in a less affluent area and has concluded that “by being where it is, the way you see Los Angeles . . . it belongs to the whole city.”

He has wondered why in Los Angeles, public buildings, such as museums, face so much resistance from neighborhood groups while commercial buildings seem to go up largely unchallenged. “You look out there at these monsters that change the city,” he said, pointing out the window toward several skyscrapers on Wilshire Boulevard, “and somehow they don’t have the same problems.”

He still believes, for example, that a white exterior would have been “appropriate in this climate.” Banning it “seemed totally arbitrary to me,” he said. But he has not given up entirely on his trademark white porcelain.

“We’ll have it somewhere, inside the building. . . ,” he said with a sly grin. “It will be like an Easter egg hunt. You’ll have to search for it.”