Building the Getty - Softcover

Meier, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520217306 ISBN 13: 9780520217300

Publisher: University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

This book provides a fascinating history of the planning, design, and construction of the six-building Getty Center in Los Angeles, one of the great cultural complexes to be built in our time. Writing with wit and passion, Richard Meier takes us behind the scenes of the thirteen-year-long, one-billion-dollar project.

About this title

Review

Richard Meier's Getty Center complex in Los Angeles, thirteen years in the making, is the subject of this autobiographical account of what has been frequently called "the architectural commission of the century." Meier has the perfect authorial voice, admirably straddling the personal and the professional with aplomb and understated flair. He opens with a straightforward account of his youthful interest in art and architecture, his basement studio in his parents' suburban new Jersey home, his education at Cornell, and his post-graduation European tour, where he unsuccessfully hounded Le Corbusier for an unpaid apprenticeship and failed to track down Alvar Aalto, another hero. His first "published" house was one commissioned by his parents; his first "freestanding work" was an $11,000 pre-fab Long Island home that was later sold to Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks. "Now I often wonder how it is that my architecture came to acquire what for many people is its singular style: this image of a perennially gleaming white building flooded with light," he writes. The rest of the book, which is punctuated by black-and-white documentary photographs, is Meier's well-crafted, detailed account of the Getty commission, including subtle descriptions of the politics involved in all aspects of its design, siting, landscaping, and daily use. It's all here: the immensity of siting the multi-building complex in the mountains overlooking the Pacific, the hundreds of architects who came to work on the project, and the craftsmen and contractors and construction crews who made it a user-friendly reality as well as a stunning modernist masterwork. Meier calmly takes the reader through the maze of issues and construction phases. Few architecture books could be more educational, or more gracefully written. --Peggy Moorman

From the Inside Flap

ca's most eminent architects tells us what it was like to undertake the architectural commission of the century: the building of the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Writing with wit and passion and in engrossing detail, Richard Meier takes us behind the scenes of the thirteen-year-long, one-billion-dollar project.

We follow Meier from 1957 when, just out of Cornell, he traveled to Europe for a grand tour and to seek work with two of his architectural heroes, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, and through to his early years in New York with Marcel Breuer. After Meier established his own private practice, we see him designing public housing and the private houses that expressed his distinctive modernist style of pure geometric line, of whiteness, and open spaces flooded with light. We also see him, in time, designing such important art centers as the Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.

And then--in

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0520217306
• ISBN 13: 9780520217300
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220