ARCHITECTURE AS SPECTACLE

It is hardly surprising that the apparently unexpected popularity of the Getty would be quantified with all the close attention of a movie release: the sheer numbers crowding the site; detailed accounts of the long lines for rest rooms; exhibitions that open and close without being seen by their own publics; the media campaign that says, essentially, “Plan ahead--don’t come now,” are all recognizable as the familiar indices of blockbuster status. It might seem strange that an institution would plead with the public not to visit, but this is the way the popularity of exhibitions like “King Tut” was measured.

What is surprising is the intensity of the public interest. Certainly, this can, in large measure, be explained by the specific circumstances of the Getty Center as seen from Los Angeles. Treated as a kind of public Hearst Castle, the building has been so long in planning and so visible in construction, its budget surpassing all projections and its collections having for so long been the best-kept secret of Malibu, that the opening months, if not years, are bound to be crowded. The policy of restricted access, long established in Malibu, hardly has deterred public curiosity; a “secret,” as sociologist Georg Simmel noted, is most desired when displayed openly, like jewelry.

But the Getty Center marks a new stage in the reception of architecture in modern culture, a phenomenon also evident in the recent opening of another museum, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain: Architecture has emerged as a mass spectacle in and of itself. Where formerly museums were appreciated and visited as much for their contents as their architecture, with the Getty, whose collections were already on display, if in reduced form, and Bilbao, whose “collection” is still in formation, the public is interested in visiting the architecture as much as the art.

Now to say the Getty is appreciated as spectacle, as a visual and spatial event in the public’s everyday life, is not, as many architects would have it, to deny the qualities of its architecture. Rather, it is to note that, among the crowds milling in the complex’s open spaces--taking in the view, walking in the gardens, climbing the ramps and stairs and simply enjoying the experience--many arrive at the top just for this. As a public space, in a city seriously deprived of such public spaces, the Getty fulfills a major role. Not a mall and not a “citywalk,” without pretensions to theme-park status, it has emerged as the spectacle of choice.

When Frank Lloyd Wright designed a project for what he called an “automobile objective,” consisting of a huge pyramidal, spiral ramp from which drivers, motoring up and around and then down again, might experience a view, he was thinking of a similar public event. Here, thanks to the Getty’s policy of restricted car access, the experience is for pedestrians, and for pedestrians arriving in large number by public transport, in a city not noted for its dedication to this means. Almost by chance, the Getty has created something far more than a museum: It has constructed a public pedestrian “objective,” a cultural acropolis that does not exclude the citizen, a space of the kind rarely found in contemporary U.S. cities.

A space and a public do not of themselves fulfill all the criteria traditionally ascribed to the public realm: Social interaction, political activity and cultural festivity all form part of what was once desired in an urban democracy. It is symptomatic of our era that a public is there, nonetheless, paying attention to buildings in a way not seen since the mid-19th century, and at a scale that even the postmodern landmarks of recent times--the AT&T; building, the extension to the National Gallery in London, the Wexner Center--have not equaled.

Perhaps only the Centre Pompidou in Paris can be cited as a precedent. There, the combination of a radical structural form, the external accessibility through banks of escalators, blockbuster exhibitions, a public library and surrounding cafes, as well as a forecourt that has become a contemporary version of a medieval fair, has continued to attract the public. At the Getty, where access is more limited and deprived of such social uses, the architecture is forced to stand in for a lost, or perhaps a not yet found, social scene.

Getty architect Richard Meier and his patrons stressed from the outset their intention to rival the public spaces of Europe. In this sense, the long research carried out by architect and clients, including journeys to many important world sites, has been successful. But, on another level, the mass appreciation of a design with such high architectural aspirations is unprecedented. This alone is novel enough to warrant the question: Why here, on a site hard to reach, in this museum of high culture, among these highly abstract and theoretically complex buildings, do we find a huge public reveling in the spectacle itself?

Since we cannot expect every member of the public to have a professional appreciation of Meier’s architecture, we might see this as a result of a much heralded turn toward the “visual” in contemporary life, one reinforced by the ubiquity of digital media but in preparation since the advent of television. The “society of the spectacle,” prophesied by critics such as Guy Debord in the 1950s, has been realized to an extent even its most committed critics failed to comprehend. While such criticism--of virtual violence, of virtual war, of life itself turned into an unreal spectacle--is justified, the new visual culture has produced nonetheless an unexpected effect in architecture. Where the spectacle has generally had the effect of distancing the public from culture, as cultural analysts from Walter Benjamin in the 1930s to Jean Baudrillard in the 1980s have claimed, for architecture, it has had the paradoxical result of increasing attentiveness.

This is not entirely unprecedented. Monuments historically have been objects of idealization and symbolic value, overlaid with all the connotations, good and bad, of their respective public or private functions. But in the modern era, architecture generally has been seen as a servant of, rather than an object of, mass society’s attention. As the novelist Victor Hugo never tired of pointing out, architecture, by the early 19th century, was no longer the visual “book” of humanity, but was replaced by the printed book itself. Since Hugo’s death, this displacement of architecture from center stage has been repeated by other media, from the movie to the web. If major buildings attract attention, it is for the way they accommodated their functions--modern architecture was, after all, created under the banner of “functionalism”--than for their independent formal values.

Modern architects have tried to counter this lack of visibility by erecting myths of the heroic designer, struggling against the prejudices of a shortsighted society. Wright and Le Corbusier, in particular, were not reluctant to play the double role of misunderstood martyrs and self-proclaimed supermen in their fight for recognition. The figure of Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” was by no means a caricature of the modern architect. His hubris was matched by that of many real designers in the 1930s and 1940s.

But the image of the architect as a sort of Nietzschean figure intent on designing the world has faded since the 1950s. Postmodernism, while trying to revive the substance of a lost architectural world, succeeded in reviving little more than the image, signified in the Time magazine cover of Philip Johnson holding a model of the AT&T; building. Compared with Roark’s relentless edifice complex, the architect in Peter Greenaway’s postmodern fantasy, “The Belly of the Architect,” is but a shadow of his former self. The celebrated opening scene--he is standing before the Pantheon in Rome, clapping in solitary admiration--seems to epitomize the isolation of the architect in the late 20th century.

The recent experience of the Getty, however, as well as that of other well-publicized architecture “events,” seems to indicate a renewal, at a far larger scale, of public interest in architecture, and this despite the fact that architects themselves have largely renounced the self-aggrandizing images of their predecessors. The crowds clamoring to visit Meier’s buildings have replaced Greenaway’s two hands clapping with a mass interest once reserved for the historic tourist site or theme park. This renewal of interest, however, no longer invests the architect with heroic proportions, nor the building itself with symbolic qualities, as was previously the case. Architects like Meier and Frank Gehry, who no doubt secretly enjoy media attention, do not seek to emulate Roark’s grandiosity. Now, it seems the public simply enjoys the spectacle of space itself, internally in the complex structures and light-filled forms of the galleries, externally in the play between objects and site.

It is as if the deeply personal experience of light and form recounted by Le Corbusier on his first visit to the Acropolis has been rendered accessible to a wider public; as if, indeed, the values promulgated by the first generation of modernists have been assimilated, and are now generalized in a way that allows a nonprofessional audience to participate in the “performance” of architecture. Since the Roman theorist Vitruvius, architecture has always been linked to stage-craft, so this is a return to a more traditional role of architecture in culture.

This is not an unalloyed virtue. The closeness of our appreciation of architecture as spectacle has led many architects, including Meier, to criticize what they see as a dangerous slippage from the spatial and tactile values of inhabited architecture into the virtual images of a superficial sideshow. Certainly, Meier’s work at the Getty complex cannot be accused of pandering to superficial reception. It does not give itself over to easy looking, in the sense of “easy listening.” Indeed, its complex structures and spatial abstractions call for an attentive and close “reading.” Yet, it is undeniable that this “difficult” architecture, like so much equally difficult modern music and painting, has achieved recognition by means of the effect of the visual turn in culture and media, the shift from the culture of the book to that of the screened image.

This has transformed the world in which Hugo could so confidently proclaim the “death” of architecture, into one in which a wider public has access to, and confidence in, its visual judgment. It is as if initiation into the world of virtual reality has prepared us for a different, if not an enhanced, experience of reality itself and, judging by the crowds, even a pleasure in experiencing a higher architectural level of that reality.