Stronghold of the Arts Takes Shape Above City : Culture: The $733-million Getty Center, about half complete, has sparked a flurry of debate. Local media will get a look at what the fuss is all about at an open house this week.

To the wonderment and, no doubt, perplexity of hundreds of thousands of daily commuters, it rises in Sepulveda Pass like a 14th-Century mountaintop stronghold.

Sprawling along a ridge line high above the San Diego Freeway, the emerging structure of box-like buildings and interlocking walls presents a portentous visage of money and power.

Up to 800 workers at a time, like the craftsman of a medieval city, stride its scaffolds laying Italian marble, scurry over its Olympian terraces planting trees by the thousand and scale its three-quarter-mile elevated causeway laying track for the tram that will someday connect this enclave on the hill to the world below.

Without so much as a sign to identify their purpose, they could as easily be erecting a hotel for the unconscionably rich or a retreat for an order of ascetic monks.

Neither commercial nor reclusive motives, however, are behind one of the largest construction projects under way in the western United States. The emerging wall of marble is to be a stronghold of the arts: the future home of the world’s most formidable private arts institution, the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Already 10 years in the making--and still three years from its scheduled 1997 opening--the $733-million Getty Center is now about half completed, a milestone that has prompted Getty officials to conduct an open house this week.

The informal tour Thursday will give the local news media a look inside the 110-acre college-like campus that will consolidate the Getty’s Malibu museum with the trust’s art history, education and conservation programs, now in rented quarters in Santa Monica and Marina del Rey.

The scale and ambition of New York architect Richard Meier’s project have touched off a flurry of debate.

While a minority of critics decry the center’s provocative location and massive profile, no one denies that the Getty Center has already established itself as the Los Angeles cultural landmark to eclipse all others.

“If God had the money, this is perhaps what he would do,” said the prickly Los Angeles design critic Sam Hall Kaplan, who was prepared to hate Meier’s architectural statement but found he couldn’t.

“The statement . . . is that this is a cultural institution here for the ages, not a passing indulgence, not a deconstructionist exercise by yet another narcissistic architect, of which there are many.”

Less sanguine observers have faulted the center as elitist, remote and confusing, comparing it to the Getty Trust itself.

“Looking up 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,” critic Leon Whiteson wrote in The Times.

Noting that most of the criticism comes from the East, Kaplan said he detects a hidden envy that Los Angeles, and not New York, has the Getty, whose ambition, as New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger concedes, is “to spring full-blown from the brow of this hill in Brentwood as the world’s largest, richest, most comprehensive and most ambitious institution in the visual arts.”

Local commentators, indeed, can hardly restrain their expectation that the consolidated prestige of the Getty will elevate Los Angeles to the cultural status of New York and Paris.

“It will become one of the must-visits for anyone who has traveled,” said Los Angeles city Planning Director Con Howe. “Anyone will consider it as important as the Louvre or the National Gallery.”

Howe, formerly a planner in New York City, said the Getty Center will be different from other great museums like the Metropolitan or the Pompidou because Los Angeles is a different kind of city from New York or Paris.

Elaborating on that theme, architect David Martin said freeways have replaced rivers and grand boulevards as travel arteries.

“I think it’s important for Los Angeles to have it along the freeway,” Martin said. “It reminds all of the million or so people who drive it every day that there is a part of our culture that has to do with art and fineness and education.

“I don’t think that’s a bad idea to have in everybody’s face every day,” he said.

The quintessential Los Angeles creation, the Getty Center may become the world’s only important urban museum that will never be “discovered” by a tourist rambling the byways of a strange city.

Visitors, who may need reservations to get in, will ride a Euro-style tramway from a six-level underground garage beside Sepulveda Boulevard to a formal transit stop atop the hill.

From there, the 700 Getty employees will angle north toward the working end of the institution containing administrative offices and the bulk of the Getty’s other arts programs.

The hilltop complex will also feature a cafe, a restaurant, a 450-seat auditorium, gardens, fountains and panoramic views of the mountains, the Pacific and the city skyline.

The centerpiece, a museum complex of pavilions ringing a garden courtyard, will house all the existing Getty Museum’s collections except its Greek and Roman antiquities, which will remain at the Malibu site.

In the new museum, visitors will be able to view such high-priced Getty treasures as Van Gogh’s “Irises” bathed in natural light, as well as holdings the public has not seen before because of limited gallery space in Malibu.

Nothing like the center now exists in Los Angeles, or anywhere else. And it is unlikely that any contemporary institution but the Getty Trust, whose endowment is worth $4.1 billion, could afford such a project.

In a sense, the center and the trust evolved together.

Little known before J. Paul Getty’s death in 1976, the trust gained visibility as it doubled, then tripled, the oil magnate’s $1 billion bequest.

Required by federal law to spend no less than 4.25% of its assets each year, the trust began to sprout programs. There are now eight. They include a grants program, a high-tech art history information program, a worldwide program to promote the conservation of endangered artworks and a center for the history of art and the humanities, which offers yearlong fellowships to a dozen scholars.

In the past, Getty Trust President Harold Williams said he wanted to give each new program its own identity, with its own directors and space. The decision to pull them together on a campus presented the challenge “not only to help create the architecture, but also to create the institution itself,” Williams said.

The give-and-take slowed the planning to a seven-year crawl. Along the way, costs climbed from the opening estimate of $360 million to the current $733 million, bemusing some in an expectant art world.

“If most projects today suffer from too little time and too little money,” observed critic Goldberger, the Getty’s problem has been “too much time and too much money.”

From the beginning, however, the project also has been molded by political compromise. The conditional use permit obtained by the trust in 1985 imposes 107 conditions meant to mollify the wealthy and politically connected neighbors in Brentwood and Bel-Air.

The museum and related structures will occupy only a quarter of the 24 acres reserved for development at the top of the hill. A height limit of 65 feet above the plaza level for the museum complex and 45 feet for the other buildings forced Meier to abandon his vision of modeling the center’s profile after an Italian mountaintop village with turrets and towers.

Even the neighborhood’s objection that Meier’s signature white enamel surfaces would create too much glare prevailed. In place of the smooth bright building skins, 180,000 slabs of rough-hewn beige travertine marble were imported from the same quarries that supplied the Vatican.

As another concession, the center’s seven-level, 1,550-space parking structure, now complete, is buried underground at the west end of the one access road, Getty Center Drive off Sepulveda Boulevard.

Neighbors’ concerns about traffic led to the electric tram system.

Some of these accommodations may contribute to the complaint that the experience of the Getty will be too orchestrated, like a visit to Walt Disney World, where by design, random experiences are kept to a minimum.

But it is, above all, the imposing location that arouses the emotion of critics.

Calling it an “elitist statement 25 million times worse” than an ethnic slur, one architect who asked not to be named said the hilltop location represents an obvious disdain for the city below, a sentiment more suited to the 19th Century than the 20th.

Countering that view, Adolfo Nodal, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, praised the Getty for its street-level programs to restore a mural by Mexican artist David Siqueiros on Olvera Street and assist the Watts Towers Arts Center.

“It is up on a hill, and it will be a Taj Mahal, but I think they’re aware of that and make sure the community gets there, and that they get to the community,” Nodal said. “I think they’re really focused now on trying to take this incredible bounty that they’ve got to make sure that the people in the city are getting access to it.”

Getty officials are confident that the interplay of natural and man-made beauty will connect their center with the city below.

“We see it as a place where people will come to see Los Angeles,” said Getty Museum Director John Walsh of the new complex and its sweeping vistas.

“It’s a place that will have lots of moods,” said Walsh, who, as an art historian, understands the power of atmospheric effects. “It’s right where the sea air plays a teasing game with drier air inland, so fogs sometimes come in that far and then back off again and swirl around above you.”

Now little more than concrete bones, the museum will be the center’s big draw. Visitors will enter a two-story circular lobby, which will include a book and gift shop and two orientation theaters. The glass-filled lobby will open to a 61,000-square-foot garden courtyard. Visitors can then choose among the five gallery pavilions that make up the museum proper.

Walsh said the facility will allow people to see many of the Getty’s holdings, long in storage, for the first time. There will be twice as much room for displaying photographs. The Getty’s growing collection of drawings will have more gallery space, as will its little-known collection of European sculpture. Fourteen galleries will house the Getty’s important collection of French furniture and decorative arts.

Most of the paintings will be displayed in second-story galleries normally flooded with daylight.

“These are rooms that have exactly the kind of lively, beautiful natural light that most pictures were painted in and intended to be seen in,” the director said.

Walsh said 1.5 million visitors a year are expected, triple what the Malibu museum can accommodate. As a result, the center will probably require visitors to make advance parking reservations, at least at first, just as the Malibu facility does. The plan is to drop the reservation requirement as soon as possible.

As the opening draws closer, one travertine slab and newly planted tree at a time, the one fear seems to be that the center will prove too popular.

“I think the problem,” Walsh said, “is going to be dealing with the number of people who want to come.”

Times staff writer Aaron Curtiss contributed to this report.

The Getty Center

The castle-like complex rising on the Brentwood hillside just west of the San Diego Freeway will open to the public in mid-1997. The 110-acre site will feature a museum, a restaurant/cafe, a 450-seat auditorium, acre upon acre of gardens, fountains and panoramic views of the mountains, the Pacific and West Los Angeles skyline. The project is expected to cost $733 million.