The Getty Center Campus and its Travertine
Richard Meier (born 1934) · 1984 to 1997
The Getty Center sits on a ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains nearly three hundred metres above the freeway, a small white city of pavilions, terraces and courtyards with Los Angeles spread out below and the Pacific glinting to the west. Richard Meier spent thirteen years on it. He laid the whole complex on a grid of seventy six centimetre squares, then rotated part of it to follow the line of the freeway and the line of the ridge, so the buildings feel both ordered and relaxed. Water runs through the courtyard in channels and pools, and every turn opens a new view.
The stone is the thing to touch. Meier clad the base of the buildings and paved the plazas with travertine quarried at Bagni di Tivoli near Rome, the same beds that supplied the Colosseum, but instead of polishing it he had the blocks split by a guillotine so that the rough cleft faces show fossils, leaves, feathers and shells caught in the stone. Look for them in the courtyard paving and on the walls of the arrival plaza. Above the stone, the buildings are wrapped in square panels of white enamelled aluminium, and the two materials play off each other, warm against cool, ancient against modern.
The museum opened in December nineteen ninety seven and cost about one point three billion dollars, paid for by the trust that J. Paul Getty left to his museum. Admission has always been free, which Getty specified, and the site was planned so that visitors would move slowly between galleries, gardens and views rather than rushing through corridors. One detail to look for: the fountains in the museum courtyard rise among rough boulders, a hint at the mountain the whole complex is built on.
Did You Know? So many fossils were found in the travertine that Getty staff produced a guide for children to hunt for leaves and fish among the paving stones.
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