Plans for Getty Center Unveiled : Architecture: The $360-million project in Brentwood is larger and more expensive than originally anticipated and is expected to draw an international parade of visitors.

The J. Paul Getty Trust on Wednesday unveiled architectural plans for its $360-million Getty Center in Brentwood--a project far larger, later and more expensive than originally anticipated.

New York architect Richard Meier’s project, which the art press has dubbed “the architectural commission of the century,” is a campus-like arrangement of six buildings set amid gardens and terraces covering 24 acres of a 110-acre promontory between Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive, just west of the San Diego Freeway. The complex is expected to open in 1996.

When completed, the center is expected to be a magnet for an international parade of visitors and scholars, enhancing Los Angeles’ position as a major art center. The new museum alone is expected to attract about 1.25 million visitors a year, about three times the attendance of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu.

The new buildings, occupying an area of 940,000 square feet, will include a 360,000-square-foot museum for the Getty’s collection of European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, photographs and decorative arts. Additional structures will house facilities for five other trust programs, administrative offices, an auditorium and a restaurant. The present museum in Malibu will be converted to a showcase for Greek and Roman antiquities.

Getty officials revealed final plans for the center in a news conference on the site, where a 10-by-15-foot model of the complex was on display.

“This is a great day for me,” Meier said, recalling that he had won the commission almost seven years earlier.

Plans for the Getty Center have been the subject of speculation since 1982, when the J. Paul Getty Trust received the bulk of the billionaire oilman’s personal estate. The art world began watching to see how the trust would use its fortune, currently valued at $3.2 billion and one of the largest of its kind in the world.

Trust officials in 1983 acquired the Brentwood site, announced plans to construct a $100-million art center and launched an international search for an architect. Meier, 1984 winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, was selected in 1984 out of three finalists who emerged from an initial roster of 33 contenders.

The projected completion date was bumped from 1988 to 1991 and ultimately to 1996. Getty officials attribute delays to the complexity of the site, governmental regulations, a quest for architectural excellence and lengthy processes of community diplomacy.

Meanwhile, the project grew in scope and inflation took off, escalating construction costs to the current estimate of $360 million.

Officials say that early estimates of budget and construction time were unrealistic.

The center will unify the trust’s programs on art history, conservation and education, which are currently housed in offices and warehouses scattered around the Westside, said Harold M. Williams, president of the trust. “Synergy is something that’s more talked about than achieved, but it’s something that can happen and will happen here,” he said.

Visitors will enter the complex from Getty Center Drive and park in a six-level, 1,200-car, underground structure, currently under construction. A four-minute ride on an automated electric tramway will transport visitors to the top of the hill, at the intersection of two natural ridges. Six buildings will be arranged along the ridges, which form a Y-shape.

The museum will occupy the most prominent location, on the eastern ridge overlooking the city. Three other buildings also will be constructed on the east side: a 450-seat auditorium, a building housing the trust offices and the Getty Art History Information Program (which applies computer technology to art research), and an L-shaped structure for the Getty Grant Program, the Getty Center for Education in the Arts and the Getty Conservation Institute.

A restaurant and a large, circular building for the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities will be located on the more secluded, western ridge. Terraced gardens that slope down to a ravine containing a circular reflecting pool will separate the ridges and frame a dramatic view of the city. The buildings, to be clad in beige stone and porcelain-enameled steel panels, will be set in an environment of formal gardens. The remainder of the hill will be more informally landscaped or planted in native chaparral.

The project is unique because of the diversity of the center’s functions, the conception of the complex as a whole and the relationship of architecture to landscape on a highly visible hilltop site, Meier said. Creating “a wholeness” out of “separate identities” turned out to be the greatest challenge, he said.

The Getty Center is “one of the most challenging architectural projects of the century,” according to Stephen D. Rountree, director of the building program.

“More than just building buildings, the project has been about planning for the future shape of the Getty Trust,” he said. “One of the real challenges was to put together buildings at the same time as we were establishing our own identity. . . . We were forced to come to grips with what kind of institution we wanted to be.”

Some Brentwood neighbors expressed fears that the project would threaten their privacy, dislodge wildlife and bring unwanted traffic to the hillside that has long formed a buffer zone between their homes and the freeway. Meetings with representatives of the 3,000-member Brentwood Homeowners Assn. eventually produced agreement on most issues and persuaded the Getty to limit the height of buildings to 65 feet above the ridge and to build a stone wall screened by cedars around the property.

The public will get to know the Getty Center primarily through the new museum. Instead of a single building, it will consist of five, two-story pavilions and a lobby clustered around a garden courtyard, Museum Director John Walsh said. Paintings will be shown on the second floor in natural light. More delicate works will be displayed on the first floor under low electric light. One surprise for visitors will be “a kind of 18th-Century world” of decorative arts that have been purchased specifically for the new museum, he said.

“The museum is an up-to-the-minute place in the way we’ve tried to think through how visitors will move through it. We want people to plan their own time and feel in control. It’s also up-to-date in the way we want to help people get information about the collection,” Walsh said.

“But in other ways, this is a museum with a lot of old-fashioned virtues. It’s a place where individual works of art get what they need the most, beautiful light, and have a relationship with other works of art and with visitors,” he said.

“The buildings will be exciting,” Williams said. “There’s a quiet drama to them. They are conceived to fulfill the objectives of the program of the center and the trust, and to be compatible with the environment. I think they are beautifully done.”

The Getty Center Design

Here is a look at the design for the new, $360-million Getty Center, which was unveiled Wednesday. Dominating the 110-acre hilltop site in West Los Angeles will be a new J. Paul Getty Museum, a 360,000-square-foot facility for the museum’s vast art collections. Other buildings including a history center and conservation institute will be part of the complex. The Getty’s collection of antiquities will remain in the existing facility in Malibu.

When the new complex is completed in 1996, visitors will enter from the San Diego Freeway via Getty Center Drive, park and take trams to the center.