FDA - NEWS - GETTY VILLA

MALIBU, Calif.

Tucked into a narrow ravine above the Pacific Coast Highway, the Getty Villa, a faux-Roman retreat brimming with real Greco-Roman antiquities, has always drawn strong reactions. Built in the 1970's by an eccentric mogul, it was derided by aesthetes as a vulgar display of personal vanity. But the public was entranced by its splendor, and continued to flock there until the villa closed for renovations in 1997.

So it would be natural for some visitors to approach the revamped Getty Villa, scheduled to reopen on Jan. 28 after a $275 million expansion, with apprehension.

The complex, designed by Machado & Silvetti Associates of Boston, is genuinely an exquisite work of architecture. Reconfigured as an elaborate architectural narrative, it approaches the historical past with the scholarly attention normally reserved for real ancient ruins.

But to what end? The gaudy beauty of the old Getty was its underlying message: the vision of a dying oilman thumbing his nose at the pretensions of the East Coast art establishment. By comparison, the newly expanded villa strives for Old World respectability. And in wrapping the old villa in the aura of good taste, it comes close to embalming it.

Engulfed by new institutional buildings, including a research library, conservation institute and offices, its hauteur feels closer in spirit to the Getty Center, the main museum complex 12 miles to the east, a symbol of bureaucratic self-importance.

Aloofness is certainly not the message that the Getty Trust, which oversees both the villa and the center, wants to send as it struggles with accusations of mismanagement and a criminal case involving the import of looted antiquities from Italy.

But more interestingly, the villa's new image reflects a deeper conflict in the identity of Los Angeles, which has historically enjoyed flouting East Coast traditions. As the city matures and its civic leaders strive to project the sophistication of older, more established counterparts, that sense of cultural independence has begun to fade. And this threatens to tamp down the spirit that made Los Angeles one of the nation's most original architectural inventions.

Few architectural teams exude the sophistication of Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, an Argentine-born duo who rose to prominence by quoting Classical and Modernist references with equal facility. At its best, their work has been an eloquent argument for historical continuity. But their brand of postmodernism has always carried a whiff of academic pretension, a sense that the partners spent too much time with their noses in books.

Opened in 1974, the original Malibu villa is a re-creation of the Roman Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, which is thought to have been a seafront retreat for Julius Caesar's father-in-law. The builders took considerable liberties: the villa's second floor, for example, was not original, and the underground parking was more suburban than Roman in inspiration.

Rather than correct those details, the architects chose to treat the villa as a precious historic bauble. The high point of the addition is a new entry sequence that begins at the concrete parking structure and then winds its way up along a ridge along one side of the villa before descending to a 450-seat outdoor Roman theater. The path, part of an elaborate system of retaining walls that protects the villa from the surrounding hills, allows you to admire the villa from various angles.

Obviously a high architectural I.Q. is operating here. For the project to succeed, the visitor must be convinced that it's worth it to climb to the top of a hill and all the way back down again just to get to the museum entrance. Machado & Silvetti accomplish this by breaking down the sequence into a series of snapshots. From the top, visitors glimpse the Pacific Ocean before turning to continue along the landscaped promenade. From there, clusters of pine and olive trees frame views of the villa's ornate facade below.

There's even a money shot: the promenade slips along the upper edge of the outdoor theater, whose seats spill down toward the museum's new entrance, culminating in a splash of color where a row of brick-red and white columns punctuate the museum entry.

The museum's interior has also been carefully tweaked. A skylight has been punched through the roof of the atrium lobby, opening it up to the sun. A bronze staircase now sweeps up to the second floor. Windows have been added in some of the galleries to bring in natural light. And the outer peristyle garden, once the main entry point for the museum, has been restored to its original splendor, so visitors can once again take a contemplative stroll along its reflecting pool.

Historical references pile up along the way. The horizontal strata of stone and concrete evoke an excavation site; the heavy travertine blocks suggest the more abstract travertine panels at the Getty Center. The exquisite line of a bronze rail that draws the eye up along the entry pavilion's staircase is inspired by Carlo Scarpa's postwar renovations of old Italian palazzos.

But after a while, the references become exhausting. The idiosyncratic old villa was a West Coast counterpart to Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia - deeply eccentric visions all. The new Getty is more like a clever academic exercise.

This sense is compounded by the scale of the addition. A restaurant with outdoor seating under a modern take on a classical canopy looms above the villa to the north. Just beyond, additional structures are scattered over the side of the hill: a fountain court, a 250-seat indoor theater and office buildings.

Like the main Getty complex in Brentwood, the ensemble feels like a corporate retreat, set at a slight remove from the city and the car culture that is at its heart. Its sense of complacency weighs on you.

It's that vision, rather than the specific architectural details, that makes the remade villa a disappointment. When it comes to Los Angeles, I count myself among the believers. The city's mix of high and low cultures, its relative youth and indifference to history, and its vast expanses of affordable land made it the greatest laboratory of 20th-century architecture in America.

In recent years, its unique landscape has inspired architects like Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne as well as a rising generation that includes Michael Maltzan, Neil Denari and the team of Kevin Daly and Chris Genik. In Los Angeles, they found a fertile creative terrain fostered by anonymity, shifting definitions of suburbia, cheap rents and hedonistic pleasures.

But those architects have never been embraced by traditionalists. And increasingly they have had to contend with the mentality of arrivistes who are more concerned with the appearance of good taste than with new or challenging ideas.

That insecurity was evident in civic projects like the downtown Music Center, built in the 1960's as the city's response to Lincoln Center, and in the predictable decision to hire Arata Isozaki, then a leader of the postmodern movement, to design the Museum of Contemporary Art in the 1980's. Mr. Gehry, then considered merely a local talent, was offered the consolation of designing a temporary home for the museum a mile and a half away.

Today, the postmodern forms of Mr. Isozaki's MOCA are regarded with slight embarrassment. Mr. Gehry's remodeled warehouses, meanwhile, now named the Geffen Contemporary, are considered a potent reflection of the city's refreshing informality. They offer a grittier, more engaging place to view art.

Nonetheless, art institutions are still straining to conform. Just two years ago, for example, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art jettisoned a plan by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to demolish many of its 1960's-era buildings and replace them with a high-tech fabric tent on an enormous concrete plinth.

Mr. Koolhaas's design was the antithesis of the conventional art museum. Raised up on a grid of columns, its main gallery floor was arranged in parallel "lanes," like a freeway. The billowing tentlike roof evoked the temporary structures of 1960's architecture firms like Archigram, which were strongly influenced by the city's restless, roving spirit. But the board timidly opted instead for a proposal by Renzo Piano, who is a first-rate architectural talent, but who is designing museum buildings in virtually every major city in America.

It is that lemming-like attitude that J. Paul Getty scorned, and that bound his villa, in an odd way, to the visions of early Modernists like Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra. Each of them embraced the uniquely American notion that all fantasies are possible here, and that we are free to tear up our roots and reinvent ourselves when we see fit.

By comparison, the new Getty Villa, for all its refinement, is an expression of a culture more interested in validation than freedom. The fun is gone.




			Last Exit to Los Angeles New York Times, November 20, 2005 By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF MALIBU, Calif. Tucked into a narrow ravine above the Pacific Coast Highway, the Getty Villa, a faux-Roman retreat brimming with real Greco-Roman antiquities, has always drawn strong reactions. Built in the 1970's by an eccentric mogul, it was derided by aesthetes as a vulgar display of personal vanity. But the public was entranced by its splendor, and continued to flock there until the villa closed for renovations in 1997. So it would be natural for some visitors to approach the revamped Getty Villa, scheduled to reopen on Jan. 28 after a $275 million expansion, with apprehension. The complex, designed by Machado & Silvetti Associates of Boston, is genuinely an exquisite work of architecture. Reconfigured as an elaborate architectural narrative, it approaches the historical past with the scholarly attention normally reserved for real ancient ruins. But to what end? The gaudy beauty of the old Getty was its underlying message: the vision of a dying oilman thumbing his nose at the pretensions of the East Coast art establishment. By comparison, the newly expanded villa strives for Old World respectability. And in wrapping the old villa in the aura of good taste, it comes close to embalming it. Engulfed by new institutional buildings, including a research library, conservation institute and offices, its hauteur feels closer in spirit to the Getty Center, the main museum complex 12 miles to the east, a symbol of bureaucratic self-importance. Aloofness is certainly not the message that the Getty Trust, which oversees both the villa and the center, wants to send as it struggles with accusations of mismanagement and a criminal case involving the import of looted antiquities from Italy. But more interestingly, the villa's new image reflects a deeper conflict in the identity of Los Angeles, which has historically enjoyed flouting East Coast traditions. As the city matures and its civic leaders strive to project the sophistication of older, more established counterparts, that sense of cultural independence has begun to fade. And this threatens to tamp down the spirit that made Los Angeles one of the nation's most original architectural inventions. Few architectural teams exude the sophistication of Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, an Argentine-born duo who rose to prominence by quoting Classical and Modernist references with equal facility. At its best, their work has been an eloquent argument for historical continuity. But their brand of postmodernism has always carried a whiff of academic pretension, a sense that the partners spent too much time with their noses in books. Opened in 1974, the original Malibu villa is a re-creation of the Roman Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, which is thought to have been a seafront retreat for Julius Caesar's father-in-law. The builders took considerable liberties: the villa's second floor, for example, was not original, and the underground parking was more suburban than Roman in inspiration. Rather than correct those details, the architects chose to treat the villa as a precious historic bauble. The high point of the addition is a new entry sequence that begins at the concrete parking structure and then winds its way up along a ridge along one side of the villa before descending to a 450-seat outdoor Roman theater. The path, part of an elaborate system of retaining walls that protects the villa from the surrounding hills, allows you to admire the villa from various angles. Obviously a high architectural I.Q. is operating here. For the project to succeed, the visitor must be convinced that it's worth it to climb to the top of a hill and all the way back down again just to get to the museum entrance. Machado & Silvetti accomplish this by breaking down the sequence into a series of snapshots. From the top, visitors glimpse the Pacific Ocean before turning to continue along the landscaped promenade. From there, clusters of pine and olive trees frame views of the villa's ornate facade below. There's even a money shot: the promenade slips along the upper edge of the outdoor theater, whose seats spill down toward the museum's new entrance, culminating in a splash of color where a row of brick-red and white columns punctuate the museum entry. The museum's interior has also been carefully tweaked. A skylight has been punched through the roof of the atrium lobby, opening it up to the sun. A bronze staircase now sweeps up to the second floor. Windows have been added in some of the galleries to bring in natural light. And the outer peristyle garden, once the main entry point for the museum, has been restored to its original splendor, so visitors can once again take a contemplative stroll along its reflecting pool. Historical references pile up along the way. The horizontal strata of stone and concrete evoke an excavation site; the heavy travertine blocks suggest the more abstract travertine panels at the Getty Center. The exquisite line of a bronze rail that draws the eye up along the entry pavilion's staircase is inspired by Carlo Scarpa's postwar renovations of old Italian palazzos. But after a while, the references become exhausting. The idiosyncratic old villa was a West Coast counterpart to Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia - deeply eccentric visions all. The new Getty is more like a clever academic exercise. This sense is compounded by the scale of the addition. A restaurant with outdoor seating under a modern take on a classical canopy looms above the villa to the north. Just beyond, additional structures are scattered over the side of the hill: a fountain court, a 250-seat indoor theater and office buildings. Like the main Getty complex in Brentwood, the ensemble feels like a corporate retreat, set at a slight remove from the city and the car culture that is at its heart. Its sense of complacency weighs on you. It's that vision, rather than the specific architectural details, that makes the remade villa a disappointment. When it comes to Los Angeles, I count myself among the believers. The city's mix of high and low cultures, its relative youth and indifference to history, and its vast expanses of affordable land made it the greatest laboratory of 20th-century architecture in America. In recent years, its unique landscape has inspired architects like Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne as well as a rising generation that includes Michael Maltzan, Neil Denari and the team of Kevin Daly and Chris Genik. In Los Angeles, they found a fertile creative terrain fostered by anonymity, shifting definitions of suburbia, cheap rents and hedonistic pleasures. But those architects have never been embraced by traditionalists. And increasingly they have had to contend with the mentality of arrivistes who are more concerned with the appearance of good taste than with new or challenging ideas. That insecurity was evident in civic projects like the downtown Music Center, built in the 1960's as the city's response to Lincoln Center, and in the predictable decision to hire Arata Isozaki, then a leader of the postmodern movement, to design the Museum of Contemporary Art in the 1980's. Mr. Gehry, then considered merely a local talent, was offered the consolation of designing a temporary home for the museum a mile and a half away. Today, the postmodern forms of Mr. Isozaki's MOCA are regarded with slight embarrassment. Mr. Gehry's remodeled warehouses, meanwhile, now named the Geffen Contemporary, are considered a potent reflection of the city's refreshing informality. They offer a grittier, more engaging place to view art. Nonetheless, art institutions are still straining to conform. Just two years ago, for example, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art jettisoned a plan by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to demolish many of its 1960's-era buildings and replace them with a high-tech fabric tent on an enormous concrete plinth. Mr. Koolhaas's design was the antithesis of the conventional art museum. Raised up on a grid of columns, its main gallery floor was arranged in parallel "lanes," like a freeway. The billowing tentlike roof evoked the temporary structures of 1960's architecture firms like Archigram, which were strongly influenced by the city's restless, roving spirit. But the board timidly opted instead for a proposal by Renzo Piano, who is a first-rate architectural talent, but who is designing museum buildings in virtually every major city in America. It is that lemming-like attitude that J. Paul Getty scorned, and that bound his villa, in an odd way, to the visions of early Modernists like Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra. Each of them embraced the uniquely American notion that all fantasies are possible here, and that we are free to tear up our roots and reinvent ourselves when we see fit. By comparison, the new Getty Villa, for all its refinement, is an expression of a culture more interested in validation than freedom. The fun is gone. Copyright 2001 Fisher Dachs Associates