An Artwork That Will Grow on You

Art galleries, a library and a garden. Sound familiar? The tradition of gathering together for contemplation and delight examples of artistic culture, horticulture and the accumulated knowledge contained in books is an old one. For most of this century the concept has been typified in Los Angeles by San Marino’s imposing Huntington Art Galleries, Library and Gardens. Last year we lost a small contemporary version, when the Lannan Foundation shut its art gallery and dismantled the lovely poetry garden adjacent.

As the century draws to a close, however, the old concept is getting new life, in a place that’s likely to be around a while. The Getty Center, which opened Tuesday on its Brentwood hilltop, is configured around three principal public places: the multi-pavilioned art museum, the circular research institute with its 800,000-volume library and the dramatic Central Garden, a fantasist’s dream come true designed by celebrated Southern California artist Robert Irwin.

The tripartite idea, which is a good one, was the brainstorm of architect Richard Meier. His Y-shaped site plan for the Getty Center’s various buildings generally followed the hilly terrain, with the art museum situated along the eastern ridge and the research library along the western one. In the canyon between them, Meier proposed to build a formal garden, somewhat like a classical terraced amphitheater whose “stage” would be the amazing view out over the sprawling seaside megalopolis below.

Although Meier’s general idea was kept, his own design for the garden was rejected and Irwin was commissioned to create an alternative. As anyone will see who watches “Concert of Wills,” the remarkably candid documentary on the building of the Getty Center being broadcast tonight at 8 on KCET-TV Channel 28, (see accompanying review by Howard Rosenberg) Meier was less than pleased. Standing on a parapet overlooking Irwin’s work in progress, he snorts in disgust to his colleague, architect Michael Palladino, “What a disaster!”

In fact, Irwin’s garden is far from a disaster. Just how far remains to be seen, though, because the garden isn’t nearly finished yet.

The 69-year-old artist has in the past made half a dozen permanent sculptures that intervene directly in the landscape, but none with the complexity and bravura of this one. Its skeletal structure is in place, comprising stone pathways lined with Cor-ten steel, a rock-strewn stream leading to a waterfall above a large pool, a curved retaining wall of stone blocks whose glittering chips of mica dematerialize its mass in sunlight, an intricate maze of flowering azaleas that appears to float atop the water (this is one garden maze in which your eye and mind can get lost, but not your body), wooden bridges and benches placed along the way, tons of crushed gravel in a rich palette of earth tones, eccentric bougainvillea bowers built from towering steel rebar and much, much more.

A lot of the planting remains to be done, however (more than 500 varieties are going in), permanent nighttime lighting must be installed and other finishing touches need attending to. The “deer problem”--hungry local critters in the Santa Monica Mountains coming down for midnight snacks of tender, freshly planted blossoms--has also slowed completion. And because a garden is a living thing, it will be some years before the wildly diverse profusion of planted ingredients takes full root and grows together. Only then will we experience the sensory extravaganza of sight, sound and smell--changing seasonally and moment to moment--that Irwin plainly has in mind.

Still, enough of the Central Garden is in place to get a sense of what Irwin is up to here--and what he’s up to is wonderfully loony. I mean that as a compliment. The Central Garden stands in blazing contrast to the heroically idealized, purist forms of Meier’s late Modernist architecture. If the clean, beige, geometrically precise buildings were orchestrated to put you in a somewhat static and sustained state of mind, as if in contemplation of eternal verities, this wacky romp of a garden seems planned to snap you out of it.

No wonder Meier is not amused.

The Central Garden is entered along a gently sloping path that cuts back and forth across the babbling stream and plunges in and out of the hilly earth. (Picture a big Z, with an arc added at the top and the bottom, and that’s the course of the path.) The stream is lined with trees whose branches will intermingle over time to form a kind of box-hedge above your head.

When you reach the bottom, triple clusters of towering bougainvillea bowers are to the right and left. The stream becomes a waterfall, and the main garden opens up before you in a terraced circle, like a deep, wide bowl; in the center is the floating azalea maze.

To descend into the terraced bowl, you follow the path around to the garden’s far side, opposite the waterfall, and down another steel-lined zigzag path. In the course of this journey, the spectacular aerial view of the city and ocean below goes in and out of sight; eventually, the horizon disappears altogether, and you are enclosed within the playful world of the phantasmagorical garden, with the beautiful white drum of the research library looming at the left and the fortress-like art museum rising at the right.

In a way, the journey into Irwin’s garden is a canny reversal of the already famous sequence of events that brings visitors to the Getty Center. To arrive at the center you ride a slow, winding tram up the mountain to an institutional citadel at the top, looking out over the world below; in the garden, you travel downward on a zigzag path, progressively deeper into the earth, leaving the magnificent vistas behind. There, you find a carefully crafted space of highly specific individuality.

There are numerous general precedents for what Irwin has wrought here. To see one example, visit the galleries for 18th century European painting at the L.A. County Museum of Art. Hubert Robert’s monumental canvas, “Stairs and Fountain in the Park of a Roman Villa,” shows strollers in a dreamy, fantastic garden of soaring stone paths and spraying fountains, probably inspired by the painter’s visit to the famous Villa d’Este at Tivoli, outside Rome.

Like the eccentric image in the Robert painting or, for that matter, Tivoli itself, Irwin’s Central Garden is a kind of outlandish, wonder-inducing folly. And in the end, doesn’t every great estate finally require a magnificent folly, if only for the sake of sanity?

* Central Garden, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive. Parking reservations: (310) 440-7300. Closed Mondays.