A Center Above It All : Unveiling the spectacular Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities

“Where’s the garage?” asked a guest, himself an art museum director, as he gazed at a scale model on the site of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Buses had carried a few score of the arts cognoscenti of Southern California up a winding drive to a ridge crest high above the Sepulveda Pass. In the scale model, this very winding drive seemed to dead-end at the first building. Had architect Richard C. Meier forgotten a little something?

In fact, as guests learned at this unveiling of plans for the center, the parking garage is to be at the bottom of the hill, where a cavernous pit has already been dug to contain it. From the garage, guests (Getty Museum director John Walsh predicts a million of them each year) will ride by funicular to the hilltop; and up there, if the sound of an automobile motor is heard at all, it will be a distant motor. In car-crazed, car-weary Los Angeles, it may have been this detail, more than any other, that seduced the assembled aesthetes.

What will it be like, come 1996, this $360-million campus-from-scratch? “Like the Cloisters,” one guest said, recalling New York’s hilltop shrine to medieval art. Like the Cloisters, the Getty Museum will be an oasis, above the fray of the city; and like the Cloisters, it will be unabashedly European. But the center will include more than the museum.

In fact, the center proper--a two-story building in the shape of a 240-degree arc--recalled the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University to another observer. In the Getty Center, as at Stanford, each scholar will have a private office with a view into the speculative distance.

Did we say $360 million? That’s not counting the land, of course: 710 acres of Brentwood acreage, if the word acreage may be used without sacrilege against that Valhalla of walled estates. That’s also not counting architectural fees for a 940,000-square-foot complex of which Getty President Harold M. Williams boasts that no two units of 1,000 square feet will be alike.

Can they afford it? Evidently they can. The Getty Trust is unique in that it can spend $1 billion on plant, if it comes to that, and still have $2.5 billion--an endowment the size of Yale University’s--left over. The City of the Angels has found an extraordinary new angel.