Catching Up With the Getty Center : Art: A look at the $350-million Getty Center in Brentwood as it moves toward a 1995 completion date.

It has been prophesied as “an American Acropolis,” “a monument to the highest achievements of culture and the human spirit” and “a cultural ornament unrivaled in any metropolis.”

The subject of all this anticipatory adulation is the $350-million J. Paul Getty Center, which will include a museum, a center for advanced studies in art history and a state-of-the-art conservation institute, all on a 110-acre hilltop in Brentwood. Envisioned as an enlightened force that will have a profound impact on scholarship, education and conservation, the planned Getty Center has sparked art world aspirations and civic pride.

But 14 years after J. Paul Getty’s death, eight years after the settlement of his estate and two years after the completion date that was originally announced by the Getty, the most visible indication of L.A.’s “Acropolis” is a huge hole in the ground just off the San Diego Freeway between Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive, where a six-level, 1,200-car, underground parking structure is being built.

So for now, perhaps the most accurate Getty Center prophesy belongs to New York Times art critic John Russell, who wrote in 1982: “Utopia cannot be built overnight.”

As news of the planned art center has emerged over the last eight years, the projected completion date has been pushed forward from 1988 to 1991, and then bumped year by year to 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1995. Grading has now begun on the hill, the foundation will be laid in the spring and a four-year construction process will begin in mid-1991, according to Stephen D. Rountree, director of Operations and Planning. Barring unexpected problems, the buildings should be finished in 1995. But it will take several months to install collections in the new museum, which probably won’t open until 1996, he said.

What is taking so long?

The answer is mixed up in a tale of bureaucratic delays, community fears, an architectural quest for excellence and the Getty’s nascent vision of itself. It isn’t easy to build a cultural monument, and it’s particularly sticky in a wealthy neighborhood of West Los Angeles.

But after years of planning and negotiations with the Brentwood Homeowners Assn., architect Richard Meier recently revealed a plan which establishes the shape and disposition of the buildings, but omits final design details--such as the kind of stone that will clad the complex.

Talking about the process of arriving at this plan, Meier said he had to deal with “a dramatic but topographically difficult site above the San Diego Freeway; a complex program, printed in a book six inches thick, detailing the requirements of the Getty’s separate departments; a vocal and demanding chorus of influential local homeowner groups concerned that the center might overlook their properties and threaten the privacy of their houses; and a vague but emphatic feeling that the new center’s style should somehow express a quality that was essentially Angeleno.”

All of these concerns--as well as bureaucratic impediments common to most building projects--have slowed progress, Rountree said.

The 3,000-member Brentwood Homeowners Assn. eventually reached agreement with the Getty on nearly all the 107 points in the conditional use permit, however. Among conditions are restrictions on height and mass of the buildings, limitations on public access, locating most parking underground, securing the entire site, preserving the natural topography and complementing it with appropriate landscaping.

When it is finally built, the J. Paul Getty Center will have a low physical profile, with a long stone wall screened by cedars as the only element visible from surrounding neighborhoods and the freeway. Height restrictions allow the museum to rise to 65 feet above the ridge, while limiting the rest of the complex to a 45-foot roof line. Plans to locate service and delivery areas, laboratories and workshops underground will reduce the visible impact of the Getty’s 500,000 square-foot structure.

Meier was hired early so that he could work closely with Getty department heads as they developed their fledgling programs, said Philippa Calnan, public affairs director at the trust. This was a tortuous process, however. The programs have evolved from independent entities--each seeking its own identity--into a collaborative unity, and the architecture reflects that change in philosophy. While the master plan scattered isolated buildings over the site, the current plan is more unified, she said.

The shape Meier has given to the Getty’s new identity resembles the campus of an exclusive college dedicated to the display and study of artworks. Restricted to using only 24 of the site’s 110 acres, Meier has designed a Y-shaped complex to house the trust’s operations. This configuration allowed Meier to separate public and private functions of the Getty and to follow the topography of the site. Split into two ridges separated by a ravine, the Brentwood hilltop runs alongside the San Diego Freeway, ending in a dramatic drop overlooking Sunset Boulevard.

The stem of the Y accommodates trust offices, the Center for Education in the Arts, the Art History Information Program, and the Conservation Institute. A 450-seat auditorium and a building housing cafes and restaurants lies across a plaza, which is linked by a roadway and a tram to the public parking garages beside the main entrance half a mile down the hill.

The branch of the Y nearest the freeway is devoted to the museum. The other branch is occupied by the Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. The ravine that separates the branches is filled with formally landscaped terraces culminating in a colonnade that overlooks a round pool surrounded by orange groves and frames a panoramic view that stretches to the Pacific.

The museum, which will be limited to a maximum of 5,000 visitors daily, is laid out in seven separate pavilions or “clusters” arranged around a common central courtyard.

Each two-story pavilion is devoted to a particular period in the history of art. The upper levels, illuminated by skylights, will house paintings and sculpture. The windowless, artificially lit lower levels will display more light-vulnerable objects such as furniture and manuscripts.

“This configuration not only breaks down the scale of what might have been an overwhelmingly monumental museum building, it allows the visitor maximum choice and flexibility,” Meier said. “He or she may either concentrate on one period in one pavilion, or follow the history of painting along a sequence of the upper galleries, linked by walkways. And at any time a visitor may step outside onto the courtyard for a breath of fresh air, or onto one of the terraces overlooking the gardens for a longer view.”

“Originally I had in mind that the Center would follow the loose, contour-hugging pattern of a traditional Italian hillside village--a kind of Angeleno San Gimignano marked by towers. This early idea seemed suited to the terrain and to the Mediterranean inspiration of much of Los Angeles’ architectural traditions,” he said.

But the community wouldn’t stand for towers, and Meier discovered more subtle ways to link his strictly Modernist style to the Southland’s design history.

“The work of International Style pioneers such as Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s showed me how Modernist severities might be married to the easy climate and relaxed lifestyles of Los Angeles,” Meier said.

“Without surrendering a jot of their European intellectual rigor, Neutra and Schindler made their styles Californian by letting air and light into and between their buildings. And they fused their structures with the landscape,” he said.

Formal gardens will ease the transition between the architecture and nature. Getty landscape architect Emmet Wemple said his role is to “create a gradation of planting and earth-sculpting that flows out to merge as seamlessly as possible with the mountainside.”

Meier has planned a complex that will “unfold its shape as you experience it. Your ‘wow factor’ will come at the end of your visit, rather than at the start. This is a reversal of the way most of my other buildings reveal themselves, but I feel it’s right for the special nature of the Getty, and for the unpompous character of Los Angeles,” he said.

Some Getty-watchers may be impatient with waiting for the “wow factor” expected at the Getty, but Rountree is unperturbed by delays. “Time is the least important factor in the process,” he said. “Quality is important. So is cost, but time is something we are willing to take to get the right product.”