Word: meier
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Angeles, after 14 years, the Leviathan surfaces at last: Moby Museum, a.k.a. the Getty Center, sheathed in light tan aluminum and elegantly rugged honey-colored Italian travertine, nearly 1 million sq. ft. of it at roughly $1,000 per sq. ft., designed by Richard Meier and perched on a 710-acre hilltop above the San Diego Freeway in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. The Getty is the most expensive arts complex and by some calculations the most expensive building in American history. Large expectations ride on it as both a cultural institution and an emblematic focus for Los Angeles...
...Getty is not "a building." There are moments, both off site and on, when its collection of six separate units on a ridge linked by plazas and terraces resembles a very honed and buffed Modernist version of an Italian hill town. Architect Meier himself has grown wary of the hill-town analogy. "Think of it," he says, "as a small college campus with different departments, some more visible than others--not a museum but an institution in which art predominates...
...Meier, 63, has come up with a superb piece of place making. When the Epcot-style tram delivers you from the parking garage at the bottom to the plaza at the top of the ridge, you step out into a space that seems both amiable and Utopian, dignified but, despite its acreage of travertine, not authoritarian: a respite from the visual chaos of Los Angeles, but offering the best views a public could have of the city spread below...
Walsh and Meier had their disagreements about its display--Walsh liked sober, richly colored walls as a background for the art and insisted on "period room" effects for the furniture, whereas Meier wanted neither. The period decor, which was handled by the New York City architect-decorator Thierry Despont, is a flop. But Meier served the art very well, with a series of generously proportioned, plain, high-ceilinged and top-lighted galleries that don't clamor for attention and do create a feeling of undistracted serenity. They recall the enfilade effects of older museums, but Meier has cunningly provided...
...diversified Getty envisioned by Williams and the trust had to be, in every conceivable way, a class act. After the original list of 33 architects had been whittled down to three finalists, the committee in 1984 settled on the New York City-based Meier, America's chief exponent of "late Modernist" classicism. He was the one who, it was believed, could deliver an impeccable and thoughtful level of planning and detailing. One of the factors in Meier's favor was that even then he was an experienced museum designer (the Frankfort Museum for Decorative Arts, 1979-85; the High Museum...