High Above It All

One year after the Getty Center threw open its gates to the public, announcing its intent to bring High Culture to the sprawling capital of Low Entertainment, one still wonders what the Getty’s mission really is. A pretentious temple of high art? A genteel scholarly retreat? A cultural Disneyland for an increasingly consumption-oriented society? Whatever your prejudices, the Getty has been an undeniable popular success: Nearly 2 million visitors will make the pilgrimage to the Getty Center by year’s end, less than half of them armed with the much-coveted parking reservations, the rest making do with tour buses, taxis and--shock!--public transportation.

Meanwhile, the complete uniqueness of the Getty as a cultural phenomenon has become increasingly apparent. Few institutions have the Getty’s global reach. No other looks down on the city it inhabits with such utopian detachment.

Think of the great 19th-century encyclopedic museums--Paris’ Louvre, New York’s Metropolitan, St. Petersburg’s Hermitage. All were created as monuments to a city’s power and cultural importance. Nonetheless, each accepted the city as a place of cultural exchange, of social frictions. They remain embedded in the urban fabric. The Getty, in that sense, is an explicit rejection of that past. It floats high above the city, surreally detached, an aggressive challenge to the notion that art, culture and urban life are intrinsically bound together.

Yet the Getty is just as dismissive of the popular image of Los Angeles as a city in perpetual motion. The elevator is the machine that created New York, the city of congestion. The train and the automobile created Los Angeles, the sprawling megalopolis. New York bustles. Los Angeles glides. And perhaps the oddest thing about the Getty is its unease with car culture. What one would have expected here is to weave your way to the top with your hands lightly set on the steering wheel, to extend the freeway into the heart of the machine. Instead, the tram ride to the top tears you away from the experience of the city below.

Over the years, Richard Meier, the Getty’s architect, has relentlessly refined his own architectural formula. Strong geometric forms, sweeping ramps, white enameled metal panels, the delicate manipulation of light--these elements have come to define a deeply personal vision of contemporary modernity. At the Getty, that vision is fused into a self-contained cultural utopia. Climb down from the tram and you are confronted with the essential elements of a classical cityscape: a vast travertine-paved plaza, a grand staircase, an open-air courtyard. These rank among the city’s grandest public spaces. The extreme Cartesian geometry of the entry pavilion, for example--with light spilling in from all around--prepares you for the perfectly ordered world beyond, where scholarly visitors and cherubic children might mill around the courtyard’s sleek fountains and rest under the shade of slender trees. All of the Getty’s various cultural activities blend together here: Visitors can wander in and out of the various galleries, read a book, wind their way down to the garden, all while being bathed in the warm rays of the California sun. This is not a place to bring one’s worries.

So the surprise is how forcefully the city reasserts itself at every turn. Meier’s most ingenious act was to pull apart the Getty’s programs into discrete buildings. In doing so, he was able to make the city a part of his composition. The structure of Los Angeles is laid bare here: the network of freeways, the sporadic clusters of towers along Wilshire Boulevard, the blend of homogenous urban landscape and natural landscape. That strategy was extended into the design of the museum, too, which was broken apart into five interconnected pavilions. At times the buildings themselves seem to dissolve; the complex, in effect, becomes a frame for the spectacular views.

The effort works almost too well. It is the view that draws the crowds as much as the art, and however many times you visit the Getty, your first impulse is to turn your gaze toward the mountains and the city, not the museum. From this height, the city becomes a manageable abstraction. Art seems almost beside the point.

The museum is of course only one component of a much grander vision. The Getty complex is also a scholarly retreat where art is studied, preserved and promoted. And the moment when that vision is most convincing is in the design of the research institute. Here, Meier was able to create a serenely monastic environment that is set against the energy of the public spaces it borders. The doughnut-shaped building has a slice cut out of one side to open up views back to the interior of the site. Inside, circulation flows along the cylinder’s inner edge, a vast glass wall overlooking the garden and the museum, with the bookshelves and offices radiating from this central space. The tension between the research institute and the Getty’s more public spaces is where you feel the center’s purpose most intensely--the immaculate fusion of scholarly research and public enlightenment.

Yet elsewhere that sense of a perfectly composed world is beginning to show cracks. The decision to build museum galleries that cannot expand to accommodate further acquisitions seems an increasingly strange one, particularly in regard to the Getty’s growing photography collection, one of the most highly regarded in the world. More recently, one of the Getty’s six original programs--the Information Institute--has been eliminated, its functions absorbed into other programs. As the Getty evolves, such changes put into question the severe inflexibility of the Getty’s architecture. Despite the center’s image as a living, medieval-like city, it is not laid out to accommodate change. Nor was it built to adapt to a shifting culture. Meier’s architecture is a fixed ideal, set in stone.

Ironically, the Central Garden, designed by artist Robert Irwin, disappoints in a similar fashion. The garden should have been an opportunity to provide a playful counterpoint to Meier’s design, to soften that vision and create a more informal public event. Instead, the design--a narrow path that zigzags down to a circular pond and a maze of azaleas set between the museum and the research institute--is perversely confining. The path slices razor-like through the landscape, its edges overflowing with plant life. The gesture is so forceful that few climb out of its confines to stroll over the soft grass lawn on either side. Once you reach the end, the view is intentionally obstructed--there are few places to sit. What the body wants to do here is stand still, to rest, but it is relentlessly propelled forward.

In the end, the utopian idealism that level of control implies is only an illusion. The Getty’s perfect geometric forms symbolize a stubborn faith in an idealized high culture, but one that exists at a safe distance from urban reality. As such, the Getty Center is both a supremely optimistic cultural monument and a sadly pessimistic one. It puts culture on a pedestal, but it rejects one of the 20th century’s central tenets: That culture--and architecture--are profound agents of social change.