Reimagined, Restored Getty Villa Opens to ‘Wow' Reviews

Corbin, please delineate and describe the changes to the Villa that the design team incorporated into this renovation and expansion project.

The project is the renovation and expansion of what was the original Getty Museum, the Villa as it was fondly referred to by the public, to become the center for the Getty's antiquities collection for education, conservation, research, and to serve the broad J. Paul Getty Trust interests, the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Museum and the Getty Foundation, all in one location and focused on antiquities.

What assets did Getty start with?

We started with the original museum building, which was opened in 1974, the original ranch house, which had been the Getty residence from the mid-'40s when J. Paul Getty bought the property, and that was about it. Those were the two buildings that we renovated and made appropriate for the reuses as the antiquities exhibition space and as the research library and teaching space in the ranch house. Then we constructed several new structures – a new café, a museum store, new conservation laboratory buildings, a new office building, several new parking garages, a new entry pavilion and a new entry path sequence.

What was the challenge that you gave the architects that were selected and what was it about their work that compelled the Getty to choose them?

The final competition included six firms, and each was given a common lecture by John Walsh, the director at the time in 1994, that articulated the goals for the project. Each firm was then given a blank leather-bound sketchbook and asked to spend several weeks putting together their ideas about the site, about circulation on the site, about how they would incorporate the various functions of teaching, research, conservation, and exhibition, into the site and how they would enhance the visitor's experience.

I wasn't around in 1994 when the selection was made, but my sense is that what attracted the Getty to Machado & Silvetti was their idea about how to deal with the visitor, to actually treat the original museum building – which was greeted at its opening in 1974 with round choruses of dismay from the architectural critical community – with great respect and to do that in a creative way by bringing people into that building in the correct entry sequence for a Roman imperial villa. People used to come in the back door of the Villa, and Machado & Silvetti wanted to bring people in the correct front door.

Elaborate on the Villa's biggest site challenges.

I think the biggest challenge was the fact that the Villa sits at the bottom of a canyon, and the architects had to figure out how to give it a place of prominence within the site. One of the challenges to get people in the right front door in 1974 meant going into the side of a canyon that was perhaps not even conceivable at the time.

Every project evolves over time; share how the design changed from 1994 to 2006 to deal with the realities of the challenges and the expectations of the client.

I think early on Machado & Silvetti had the notion to use the metaphor of an archeological dig as a way in which they would organize the site, to treat the Villa as a restored object in an archeological dig and to construct the new elements around the museum building in a way that would reinforce that metaphor.

An outdoor theater had always been a part of the design intent, and one of the first intentions was to locate that theater as it might have been in the ancient world, up high on the hill overlooking the site. Indeed, their early site plan shows the theater a considerable distance from the museum itself.

I think for a variety of reasons, not the least of which it was going to be extraordinarily difficult to move people back and forth and the kinds of concerns that would have been raised about noise and light and other things, quickly suggested that it needed to be tucked further into the canyon.

The circulation on the site was really quite different originally. The entry was going to be from the northeast side of the museum but it migrated to the south side. In the details things change, but there was a pretty consistent sense of wanting to create a kind of visitor experience where there was a procession from arrival to the museum and a kind of unfolding of the site in a way that really revealed the building as an object in the landscape. When you came to visit before you never were able to get outside the building. You never had any sense of being any place but inside the building or right up against it. You had no sense of it in the landscape and I think from very early on that one of the really important things for Machado & Silvetti was to make it something that you could see from afar and place it in the landscape.

The original landscaping was done by Emmett Wemple. Address the role of landscape in this project and the interaction of landscape professionals with the Villa's architects.

Landscape was crucial to the project. Emmett Wemple was the landscape architect in the first Getty Villa in 1974. Dennis Kurutz, who was a partner of Wemple, was very closely involved in that project, and when it came time to hire new consultants for this new Getty Villa, the Getty hired Dennis. They did so because Dennis knew the grounds and had an enormous sympathy for and understanding of a Mediterranean landscape, a landscape akin to that of Southern Italy – the Villa is, after all, inspired by a Roman imperial villa from the Bay of Naples.

Dennis and some of the Getty staff and several of the Getty grounds people visited Southern France and Italy early in the planning process to look at gardens and look at landscape and plant material. It was very important, and the Villa does have some pretty significant gardens. With this new plan for the entry sequence for visitors, landscaping became tremendously important as a means to both reveal, showcase, and hide the Villa as visitors approach it. There's a really wonderful entry walk from where visitors park where you really don't see much of the building or the long wall around the outer peristyle garden until one point in the path where all of a sudden the building is revealed to you in the distance and then quickly hidden again by all new planting.

There were a very large number of trees – over 100 – which were in the way of new construction. The Getty boxed those trees up a long time ago, and it was exciting to see how Dennis had thought of those trees in a way that formed a really wonderful new organizing scheme for all of the new planting and landscaping. Most of those trees got replanted in different places on the site including one very large atlas cedar, which is a 140,000-pound tree.

Dennis died in the middle of the project, unfortunately. His associate Matt Randolph, who had worked with him about a year and was fresh out of Cal Poly Pomona, was asked by Dennis' family to complete the project on his behalf. So Matt and his wife Amy Korn formed a firm called kornrandolph, which took over Dennis' offices in Pasadena, inherited the project and saw it through for us.

What element of the design might not be apparent to the public on their first visit to the Villa?

One of the critical elements for organizing a visitor's experience of the site, which is explained in some of the written literature and the short orientation film in the museum, is the concept of having this building as a restored object in an archeological dig. The minute that one points out to a visitor a couple of the visual cues, they have that sense of being in a place that is carved out of the earth. A lot of the new construction material – all of the new buildings are made of concrete, exposed aggregate, wood, stone, glass – are intended to indicate geological layering.

A thin layer of Turkish porphyry pretty much encircles the museum plaza area where all of the main visitor activities are. It starts being exposed at one end as a single stair tread that then continues around the site, becomes the window sill of the museum store, continues around to another stair landing, continues around the interior of the auditorium lobby and emerges on the other side of the auditorium as another stair landing.

A docent I was leading on a tour the other day suggested that she could describe it as the "band that ties the site together" and I agree that that's precisely what it is. It's this geologic band that ties the site together. I think that's the thing that people won't necessarily understand without some quick little clue, but it certainly has been apparent to architectural visitors and people who are involved in architectural construction. They see it and get it right away.

As the project manager for such a complex project, what was your day like? Give our readers a sense of your last six years at the Villa.

I felt that my role was to be the central point for information and communication on the project. With the incredible assistance of my team of five to seven people, and working very closely with Morley Construction, Machado & Silvetti, SPF:architects (the Los Angeles firm who did an amazing job as executive architect), and my Getty colleagues, my responsibility was to know enough about what was going on to be sure that everyone who needed the same information in order to move forward had that same information. It's very easy on a project this large and this complex for people to set off without full information, because they're good, they're creative, intelligent, and they want to get it done and do a good job. The corollary to being the central point of communication was to constantly remind people that defining problems is 95 percent of solving problems and that rushing off to solve things you haven't fully defined is often wasted energy. If you spend a lot of time figuring out the definition, then you've got the problem pretty much solved. Again, it wasn't because people weren't good. It's because really good people try to solve problems right away.

We had a facilitator work with the architect and the contractor and the Getty team, and one of the things the facilitator said to us early on was that the most successful projects are ones in which when someone came into a project meeting well along into a project, they couldn't tell who was the owner, who was the architect, and who was the contractor. Everyone has to be aimed at the same goal and working on the same goal. So I really tried to make sure that everybody owned it and was headed to the same place.

And how was your relationship with the general contractor, Morley Construction Co.?

Morley Construction Company was a superb group on this project. They were engaged from the outset in the design development process with the architects and cost estimating, which is a really important thing to do, because constructability, particularly in a project where design is as complex as this, is an enormously important issue and sometimes those who are responsible for doing it know more about how something can turn out than the architects themselves do. Morely has an incredibly talented pool of young engineers and project managers, and Morely did its own subcontracting for all of the concrete work, and concrete is, in a variety of forms, one of the most important parts of realizing the intent for the project.

Share with our readers the regulations you lived with – the zoning and coastal laws, historic preservation, etc. – all of the rules one has to cope with when doing a project like this on the coast.

Let me start with what we didn't really have to deal with, which were any serious historic preservation issues. The ranch house is the most historic building on the site and it has no particular listing. It's not old enough and wasn't deemed architecturally significant enough to have one. It has significance because of its association with Getty. It's where he lived and is where the first museum was. Indeed, in our conditional use permit, it is the one part of the project that is addressed for conservation purposes, and that was done rather sparingly.

For the rest of the project we didn't have much historic preservation to deal with. We did have concerns about how to proceed if we found archeological or paleo-anthological artifacts. We dug a lot, had to export a lot of dirt and had a full-time monitor on site while we were digging, but we didn't find anything.

I think the primary issues for the public, the coastal commission, and the city were issues about traffic and noise, issues about impacts on the neighborhoods and the Pacific Coast Highway. I think the kinds of things that the city caused to be part of the conditional use permits for the project and the kinds of things the Coastal Commission was concerned to be sure we were very careful about had to do with controlling noise and traffic.

And what solutions did you devise?

With regard to traffic, the city insisted, quite reasonably, that the reservation system that had been implemented when the Getty first opened in 1974 be maintained so that there was some control of the number of people that would be coming to the site. The Getty has actually gone further than that. The system used to be one where you had to have a reservation to come in. Now you've got to have a timed ticket to come in. We're trying to control not only the number of people but also the timing of people arriving at the site.

With regard to noise, there are five noise-monitoring locations around the perimeter that were set up before the project even began. The ambient noise levels at those locations were set while the Villa was in operation in its previous incarnation, and we are enjoined from exceeding those levels by a very small threshold, and if we do we are fined.

Corbin, your work here as owner's rep and project manager will come to a close by the summer of 2006. What do you take away from this project, and what lessons might you apply in a similar situation?

I've learned a huge amount about how projects are managed. I've learned a tremendous amount about design, about things one might avoid choosing to do at the outset. And I take away an enormous sense of pride at the job we've all done. I've been close to it for six years and my judgment may be a bit flawed, but I think it's a stunning and enormously successful gift and resource not only for the Los Angeles and Southern California areas but also for the world.

One of my Getty colleagues was here a couple of months ago looking at the collection installed for the first time and said that he'd never seen the collection looking so happy. I take away an enormous sense of pride at a job done extraordinarily well by everybody on the project. I thought several times in the course of the project that, at 63 and considering retirement, I really ought to find some way to use this information for somebody.