CRITIQUE : Man, Nature and ghe Getty : Hilltop Center Gracefully Unites Topography and Architecture but Appears Awkward From Freeway

Urban Los Angeles has a unique relationship with its natural landscape.

Natural features don’t dramatically shape the city’s topography, as they do in San Francisco or Sydney. We aren’t crowded at the water’s edge like Manhattan or Chicago. Our major streets don’t follow the banks of a river such as the Seine or the Thames.

In Los Angeles the original landscape is not so much a powerful backdrop or topographical shaper as a constant reminder of the drama between raw nature and the urban environment.

When Los Angeles residents drive along freeways and highways, they have only to raise their eyes to see the baked slopes of the Santa Monica or San Gabriel mountain ranges, naked in their native scrub and chaparral. These harsh slopes remind us that the city is still relatively young and thin on the ground.

That particular relationship of the natural and the man-made is the key to architect Richard Meier’s design of the proposed $360-million Getty Center in Brentwood.

The final model of the Center was recently unveiled, marking the conclusion of seven years of planning. The process began in December, 1984, when Meier won the commission by beating out heavyweight rivals Britain’s James Stirling and Japan’s Fumihiko Maki.

Set on a dramatic ridge in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking the San Diego Freeway, the Getty Center is a graceful marriage of landscape and architecture on a spectacular site.

Conceived as a series of pavilions in a formal garden, the center lies on a hilltop with splendid views over Los Angeles. The architectural shapes are clear-cut, revealing the presence of a fine and precise designer’s mind.

These pavilions welcome the landscape. In the open manner made famous by such early Southern California modernists as Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, the Getty Center’s buildings allow interiors and exteriors, architecture and landscaping, to flow together.

The relationship here is not passionately romantic or “organic,” in the sense that buildings are inspired by natural forms. It does not depend upon the use of natural materials such as wood or rough stone.

The passion in Meier’s Getty Center is not so much sensual as intellectual. It’s about the delight in solving a complex architectural equation with grace and style. It’s about achieving a skillful and subtle integration of a semi-desert hilltop with a series of uncompromisingly geometric buildings.

However, this fine and moving integration is only achieved within the bounds of the Getty site. Viewed from the freeway, which passes along the eastern flank of its hill, the center’s profile is clumsy and rests awkwardly on the contours.

Looking up at the Getty from the freeway below, motorists will see a series of mostly windowless marble cliffs, some as high as 120 feet above the slopes from which they spring.

These tall, blank walls give much of the center’s main exterior elevation the look of a fortress without battlements. The weakest feature of the entire design is the amorphous curve of the viewing terrace and gallery that mark the Getty’s most prominent southeast prow.

Considering that most people who see the Getty in passing will get this view, its awkwardness is a major design fault.

The contrast between the gracefulness of the center’s interior and the clumsiness of the exterior is surprising, given Meier’s reputation for highly finished designs that are carefully thought through to the last detail.

Perhaps Meier was exhausted by the sheer complexity of the factors he had to take into account in designing the Getty Center.

These factors include a dramatic but difficult site; an extremely complex and varied set of client requirements; critical and vocal neighbors, and the uncertain identity of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

First, the site. Under an agreement negotiated with the Los Angeles Planning Department, only 24 of the site’s total 110 acres were available for building. The building site’s topography is complicated by the way in which the hilltop’s main ridge splits into two long and narrow spurs separated by a steep ravine.

The site’s uneven shape could have been dealt with by slicing off the tops of the ridges and filling in the ravine between them to create a level plateau for the architecture. Wisely, Meier chose to follow the natural contours with his buildings. This approach preserves the character of the site.

Another difficulty is that the only access to the Getty hilltop is by a spur road off Sepulveda Boulevard and through a tunnel under the freeway. This spur, now renamed Getty Center Drive, leads to a parking garage beside the lower terminus of a cable-driven electric tram that will shuttle visitors three-quarters of a mile to the top of the hill.

The site’s great advantage lies in the magnificent views it offers in all directions. To the south is a wide panorama from Santa Monica Bay to downtown Los Angeles. To the east the site overlooks the Sepulveda Pass and the facing slopes of Bel-Air. To the west it faces the Brentwood canyons. To the north is the backdrop of the Santa Monica Mountains.

The second factor complicating the center’s design is the varying requirements that the six separate divisions of the J. Paul Getty Trust handed the architects.

Printed in a book six inches thick, the requirements detailed the needs of the Getty Museum, the Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Conservation Institute, the Center for Education in the Arts and the Art History Information Program. Added to this was the need for offices for the trust administration, plus a huge underground complex of laboratories, workshops and storage facilities.

The buildings total 940,000 square feet, and almost every square foot has a particular and detailed function.

The third major factor in the equation was the involvement in the planning process of several groups of local homeowners. These homeowners were extremely concerned about the visual intrusion of this large complex of buildings into their residential neighborhoods.

A major consequence of the neighbors’ concern was that the overall height of the center was limited to 45 feet above an agreed base line drawn across the crown of the ridge at 896 feet above sea level. The museum buildings were allowed to exceed this height limit by an extra 20 feet.

This severe height limit killed Meier’s original conception of modeling the center on historic Italian hilltop towns shaped by towers and spires, such as Tuscany’s San Gimignano, that meander over the landscape. Instead, the layout of the complex was tightened and kept low.

The fourth, and perhaps the most confusing factor in the center’s equation was the fluid character of the Getty Trust itself.

In transition, after its founder’s death, from an essentially private organization ruled by one man’s will to an institution striving to define a new and much more public role, the trust was impelled to rethink its purpose in the act of creating its new facility.

Getty Trust President Harold Williams said in 1984 that “The most remarkable opportunity offered by the center’s design is the absolutely unique chance not only to help create the architecture, but also to help create the institution itself.”

“We couldn’t really give Richard (Meier) a clear concept of who we were because we were still in the process of defining our identity,” said Stephen D. Rountree, the trust’s director of operations and planning.

“Back then, there was a considerable tension between the urge to create a unified image and the desire to develop distinctive programs in each department. The tug between unification and fragmentation was intense.”

Rountree said that the center’s design has taken seven years to finalize largely because, “in putting a shape to our identity, we’ve been pressed to clarify our ideas of what we are and what we hope to be.”

The arduous process of molding all these factors into a successful design won’t be apparent to the visitors the Getty Center will attract after its planned opening in 1996.

These visitors will end their tram ride up the hill from the entry off Sepulveda Boulevard at a station located on the upper arrival plaza. The plaza is set below the main level of the complex, and from here visitors will only catch a glimpse of the roof of the Getty Museum, their main destination.

Flanking the arrival plaza is the restaurant and cafe complex on the northwest corner of the site. To the east of the plaza is a 450-seat auditorium intended for public lectures.

Across a narrow deck is the six-story building housing the Conservation Institute and the Center for Education in the Arts. A second six-story structure accommodating the Art History Information Program and the trust offices occupies the center’s northeast edge.

Mounting a ramp made of wide steps (or separate inclined ramp for the disabled), visitors will get their first sight of the center’s splendid location and lucid layout.

From here it’s clear how well architecture and landscape interact within the bounds of Meier’s design.

A terraced Italianate garden filled with trees and small temples falls away down a ravine between the two main wings of the complex. At the foot of the garden is a colonnaded loggia that frames the view over Sunset Boulevard.

To the left of the ravine garden is the museum, designed as a series of pavilions connected by walkways. To the right is the bold circular shape of the Center for the History of Art and the Humanities.

The garden both links and divides the areas of the center open to the public, such as the museum, from the private Center for History, which is accessible only to scholars and Getty staff. The landscaping ties the entire complex into a visual whole and eases the transition between interior and exterior spaces.

Clad in a rough textured buff travertine marble alternated with porcelain steel panels with a metallic finish, the center’s buildings are crisply shaped and detailed.

At the heart of the public sector of the center is the new 360,000-square-foot J. Paul Getty Museum.

The museum is laid out in five separate pavilions arranged around a common central courtyard. A double-height circular lobby is the starting point for visitors to tour the collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, decorative arts, furniture and photographs.

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 sculptures. 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 a monumental museum building, it allows the visitor maximum choice and flexibility.

Visitors 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.

Museum-goers may step out of the galleries into the courtyard, or onto one of the terraces overlooking the gardens for a longer view.

The longer view includes a lookout from a two-level terrace and gallery at the southeast corner of the complex. This view is one of several superb vistas out over the city and the mountains.

In contrast to such panoramas, the museum’s courtyard and galleries are intimately scaled.

The galleries, whether lit from above with natural light or illuminated artificially to protect delicate art works, are classical in style and proportions. Varying in size from 450 to 1,500 square feet, the galleries are quiet rooms with a classical air of contemplation.

Meier explained that the character and layout of the center’s galleries were influenced by his experience of such historical museums as the Glyptothek in Munich, Germany.

“When you walk through the (Glyptothek’s) galleries, you are always conscious of their relationship to the courtyard, of the relationship of the space to human scale, of the way the light comes in,” he said. “If the Getty Museum offers the visitor a comparable experience, I will be well satisfied.”

The Center for the History of Art and the Humanities across the way from the museum contains the libraries and collections used for research. The circular building has a rounded, inward-facing shape to encourage an active cross-fertilization between the various disciplines the center serves.

An open internal ramp drops from the entry down through reading areas and periodical stacks to a two-story reference space. This fluid layout makes it easier for scholars to access a complete range of materials and allows them to meet with colleagues in other fields of research.

Beneath the hilltop platform from which all these buildings rise are several levels of underground services, staff parking, delivery bays, laboratories and workshops. Buried in the hillside, these subterranean facilities help reduce the visible impact of the complex both from within the center and from the outside.

The center’s easy marriage between architecture and natural landscape enhances both.

“Neutra and Schindler showed me how to let air and light into and between severely geometric buildings,” Meier said. “Without compromising their intellectual rigor, these modernists made their architecture Californian by blurring the barriers between outside and indoors, between wild nature and human habitation.”

Getty landscape architect Emmet Wemple, a native Angeleno who also designed the landscaping at the Getty Museum in Malibu, said that his role is to “create a gradation of planting and earth-sculpting that flows out to merge as seamlessly as possible with the mountainside.”

Along with the mountains, freeways are a crucial element in the shaping of urban Los Angeles, and Meier looked to the direction of the San Diego Freeway in laying out the center’s main axes.

The freeway kinks north at 22.5 degrees as it passes below the Getty site. This split grid happens to mirror the angle between the site’s two ridges, upon which the museum and the Center for History will be built.

“Even if visitors are unaware of the physical fact of the split grid, they may well sense the connection,” Meier said.

Such visual and intellectual clues, sought in the context of a particular site and its surroundings, often influence the layout of Meier’s buildings.

In the 1984 Museum for the Decorative Arts in Frankfurt, West Germany, Meier derived the building’s double grid from the variation between the neighborhood street pattern and the slightly skewed angle of the adjacent Main River’s bank.

In the Getty Center, however, this strategy only works inside the complex. Viewed from the San Diego Freeway, the integration of the architecture and the natural landscape breaks down.

This lapse is compounded by the fact that the sophisticated style of the Getty’s interior is not reflected on its exterior. The architectural grace of the center’s internal composition does not reveal itself to passersby, which is a great pity.

Perhaps Meier has unconsciously expressed the split between the Getty organization’s strong internal sense of its purpose and its uncertain and still evolving public role. As a consequence the Getty’s architecture lacks a clear image to offer the outside world.

Compare this to the splendid clarity of Meier’s The Atheneum, in New Harmony, Ind.--a white pavilion set in a sea of greensward. Or his High Museum of Art in Atlanta, with its powerful curved and straight-edged geometries facing the city street.

Inspired by the almost classical grace of modernist pioneer Le Corbusier, particularly the pure Cubist shape of Le Corbusier’s 1929-31 Villa Savoie in Poissy, France, Meier has always sought to create a strong and clear sense of presence in his designs.

“In stating that my fundamental concerns are space, form, light, and how to make them, I mean to accentuate that my goal is presence, not illusion,” Meier wrote in the preface to a 1984 monograph on his work. “I pursue it with unrelenting vigor because I believe that today as in the past it is the heart and soul of architecture.”

In the Getty Center, Meier has succeeded brilliantly in creating a lucid and powerful presence within the bounds of the complex itself.

But in the face it presents to the city at large, the center seems crude and out of sympathy with the natural features of the site.

Seen from outside, the Getty’s architecture fails to make its presence felt as forcefully as it should, given the institution’s growing importance in the cultural life of Los Angeles.

Whiteson is a Los Angeles free-lancer who writes on architectural topics.