A Grand New Getty

By KURT ANDERSEN

American architecture has spent the past few years in the dumps, fretful and feckless. Aesthetically, there is neither invigorating ferment nor much consensus, and the collapse of both the housing and commercial real estate markets means that even big-name architects have precious little to do right now. So when Richard Meier's final designs for the J. Paul Getty Trust's vast art center, a $360 million, six-building museum-and-art-scholarship wonderland, were unveiled in Los Angeles last week, it wasn't just his envious peers who paid attention. Meier won the commission over 32 fellow architectural stars (including Charles Moore, Frank Gehry and Robert Venturi) back in 1984, and given the prominence of the project and the deep-pocket client, every year the architect spent tweaking his design only raised the stakes higher. "Architecture," said Meier on the eve of the debut of the most important work of his career, "takes a long time."

The Getty Center has been called the commission of the century, and for once that may not be hyperbole. The project includes a sprawling museum containing everything from an 18th century French corner cupboard made for the head of the Polish army to Van Gogh's Irises; a spacious, circular loft building, where art scholars can think and write, mingle and argue; a separate building devoted to harnessing computers on behalf of art-historical truth; an auditorium; a restaurant; and a huge state-of-the-art facility for conservators. All this will be set amid gardens and fountains on a positively Olympian site -- 110 acres abutting the Brentwood neighborhood, on a hill just half a mile north of Sunset Boulevard -- with panoramas to die for. "You can see downtown, you can see UCLA, Century City, Santa Monica and the ocean," says Meier, who has lived half the time in a house on the site since 1986.

The project's scale, ambition and high-mindedness -- portentousness even -- are a throwback to a time when the cultural mission was clear, thinking was big, and budgets were gigantic. But then Meier, 57, is rather gloriously anachronistic -- and high-minded and portentous -- himself. While most of his peers have spent the past two decades feverishly inventing (or capitulating to) a sometimes gimcrack neo-neoclassicism, Meier has remained an unrepentant circa-1927 Corbusian -- modernism's last best heir. "I don't think you change your values every day or every time you do a new building," he says. "If you are worried about style or what is the trend of the moment, you are in trouble."

Meier's architecture is cool and impeccable, deluxe abstract collages of interlocking white-metal-clad boxes and curved white-metal-clad walls, with nothing but dark punched windows and steel stair rails for exterior ornament. It is architecture for the 21st century as imagined in the early 20th century. There are no diversionary pediments and keystones, only suave geometries and rigorous details. His best-known work has been relatively small-scale zillionaires' villas and a few museums.

Happily, although the Getty complex will contain as much floor space as a skyscraper, Meier has scattered its nearly 1 million sq. ft. among six sharply distinct buildings, none taller than five stories. The largest is the museum, which is, in turn, broken up into five pavilions set around a 1 1/2-acre garden courtyard, interconnected by walkways, some open air. The arrangement means that a visitor's tour will be punctuated by blasts of California blue sky and sunlight: Rembrandt and Ruisdael landscapes interspersed with real- life Pacific vistas.

The one part of the Getty that diverges somewhat from Meier's earlier work is the Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the intellectual core of the enterprise. Frank Lloyd Wright is one of the gods from whom Meier claims stylistic influence, and the basic form of this building -- a five- story cylinder whose salient interior feature is a broad ramp that follows the building's curve as it descends -- suggests Wright's Guggenheim Museum with the sides straightened and one large slice of the layer cake removed.

Overall, the stucco and cleft-cut stone will give the Getty a nice grittiness lacking in Meier's previous work. Instead of the usual aloof Meieresque facades, the buildings are full of verve; they are even a bit manic. Instead of sleek uninterrupted planes of metal and glass, there are balconies, loggias and shady brise-soleils. If the new Getty becomes a lively, civilized place, it will be because, for all the white-on-white elegance, it is not pristine and hermetic, not another gorgeous monolith. The rugged terrain and Meier's good planning sense have dictated a dense urban messiness, with odd angles and almost ungainly juxtapositions, rather than some prissy classical grid over which buildings as jewels are dispersed just so.

Construction begins on the main complex next spring, and Meier, whose architecture depends on precision detailing, will have to be especially vigilant about the quality of the Southern California craft: Taco Bell stuccowork won't do. But considering the budget and Meier's habitual perfectionism, it looks as if the Getty Center, when finished in 1996, will have justified all the fuss.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York