Word: meier
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Their number was small and many were almost as old as the Bolshevik takeover itself. ?They don?t have a lot else to be enthusiastic about,? observed TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier...
...hard stuff began. With Walsh, Williams and other members of the building committee, Meier went all over the world studying museums and monuments, from the Certosa near Florence to the Glyptothek in Munich, from the Villa Lante in Bagnaia (a distant memory of whose watercourse is preserved in one of the Getty's gardens, designed by the California artist Robert Irwin) to key American museums, such as the National Gallery in Washington and the Yale Center for British Art. "This," says Meier dryly in his memoir Building the Getty, to be published next month by Random House, "generated a great...
Most intractable of all was the task that faced Meier and Stephen Rountree, the director of the building program, in getting a conditional-use permit from the city of Los Angeles. This entailed dealing with scores of regulations; no excavated earth, for instance, could be moved off the site. It also meant interminable meetings, sometimes verging on the rancorous, with associations of homeowners in the surrounding areas of Bel Air and Brentwood...
...list of conditions met to get the permit to break ground eventually ran to 107 items. Some were major design considerations. The neighbors didn't want Meier's signature white surfaces glaring at them in the Pacific sun, and the metal cladding panels were accordingly colored a pale tan. They insisted on, and got, strict limits to the height of the buildings. And they hated the idea of culture-curious hoi polloi, 1.3 million of them expected each year, looking down into their backyards. One woman feared that visitors to the Getty would look across the valley from a spur...
...Richard wanted the freedom to play with heights," says Rountree. "He doesn't like having to fight over issues of what color things are. He was driven nuts by the process, and it took time." Time and, by Meier's count, some 300 round-trip flights between New York and Los Angeles--plus living off and on in a "dark, rat-infested, Raymond Chandlery house on the Getty site." During those 14 years "my children grew up, my hair turned whiter, and many friends lost touch with me. In Los Angeles I was forced to develop an entirely new approach...