Taking On an Imperial Task

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Richard Meier will design the $100 million Getty arts complex

The site is breathtaking: 24 prime acres atop a steep ridge in California's Santa Monica Mountains. To the west there is a sweeping view of the Pacific Ocean; to the east, the skyline of downtown Los Angeles. Says Architecture Critic Reyner Banham of the site: "Not since the Roman emperors built their summer villas on the isle of Capri has there been an opportunity like this."

The owner of the land, the J. Paul Getty Trust, plans to live up to that Roman precedent with an enterprise of imperial scope. The trust, which administers the world's richest endowment in the visual arts, will erect a $100 million-plus arts and humanities complex. Scheduled for completion in 1991, the complex is to include a museum, a conservation institute and an academic center for research in art history, the last including housing for scholars. When the project was conceived, it was clear that the architect entrusted with the design would have one of the choicest, most challenging commissions of the decade. To find the right person for the job, the Getty trustees 18 months ago appointed a panel of seven experts, headed by Bill N. Lacy, president of New York City's Cooper Union design school, to conduct an extraordinary worldwide talent search. Now, based on the panel's recommendations, the trustees have announced their choice: America's Richard Meier.

The Manhattan-based Meier, 50, is an unrepentant modernist, an outstanding exponent of rational, functional architecture in the tradition of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. "I am often labeled a disciple of Le Corbusier," Meier says. "Sure, I think he was the greatest architect of the century. But then I am also a disciple of Borromini, and I'm affected no less by Bramante and Bernini, whose work I studied in Rome." Indeed, both lines of influence are visible in Meier's work. His buildings reflect Le Corbusier's interplay of geometric forms, and they are as flooded with natural light as the churches of the 17th century Italian baroque masters.

Meier is best known for the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, which opened last year, a gleaming white tour de force with a majestic presence. It is the latest in a distinguished series of structures in which Meier's signature porcelain panels and white pipe railings are used with remarkable consistency and yet unflagging invention. Among the others: the Smith House in Darien, Conn. (1967); The Bronx Developmental Center for the mentally retarded (1976); and the Atheneum, a visitors' center at the restored Utopian community of New Harmony, Ind. (1979). Meier has also designed museums that are under construction in Frankfurt, West Germany, and Des Moines. In recognition of his body of work, Meier was awarded the 1984 Pritzker Prize last April. The honor, architecture's equivalent of the Nobel, confirms his place in the forefront of contemporary architects.

A graduate of the Cornell College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Meier did some painting during his early years, turning out large abstract-expressionist canvases. Nowadays he assembles intricate collages ("my workout"), and his architectural drawings are collectors' items. He also cuts an impressive figure in person. With his dark-rimmed glasses and conservative suits, offset by a flowing white mane, he looks as though he had designed himself.

"American architecture," he believes, "is going all over the place, like pellets sprayed from a shotgun." He is particularly disenchanted with the postmodernist eclecticism that has become fashionable in the past decade. "You cannot evoke the past by simply taking historical symbols and using them as applique," he maintains."What does it mean to put a Roman arch over someone's house in Connecticut? Nothing. Architecture has to do with the totality of the building, not the application of illiterately assembled elements."

What is needed, says Meier, is not an abruptly new architecture but a creative extension of the modern tradition, and he applies the prescription to his newest assignment as well. "I will have 18 months or so to work out my design concept for the Getty complex," he says, "but I already know that it will not be a white, porcelain-clad structure like the High Museum or the museums I'm doing for Frankfurt and Des Moines. It would be out of place on that site. Besides, I felt ready to shift direction, to change my style a little, even before this commission came along."

As for what turn his style might take on the Getty project, Meier will say only that it will be determined by the setting:

"Just as a good skyscraper must be designed in the context of the entire city, this project must be designed in the context of the entire landscape, the climate, the history, the views from the ridge onto the ocean, the mountains and Los Angeles."

The Getty trustees' requirements are for a complex that will enhance the world of art, nurture research, respect the superb site and contribute to the culture of Los Angeles. In Richard Meier, they have an architect who is eager and able to deliver.

--By Wolf Von Eckardt