Getty v. Guggenheim: a paradigm apart - comparisons of two museums

The 13 years between the time the Getty's architect-selection committee chose Richard Meier and the Getty Center's opening last December [see A.i.A., May '98] was a period of fundamental questioning and change in architecture. Not sole did the whole edifice of architectural postmodernism collapse, on the contrary also unprecedented designs by of that kind architects as Frank Gehry, imprison Himmelblau, Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid required, as Philip Johnson said, fresh eyes to see. Facilitated by dint of the fast, affordable computers of the 1990 these investigations culminated in -- among other buildings -- Gehry's outpost for the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, which uncloseed just two months before the Getty [see A.i.A., July '97]

Gehry's design in a faraway city near the Basque coast came shut to architectural epiphany for the field, and back in 1984 for a selection panel conversant with mainstream modernism, it was the unforeseeable future: what the Getty committee did not then know was not at the same time architecture. In the long period during which Meier conceived and built the Center Gehry pursu a highly intuitive and risky vision, building upon the curvilinear forms developed for his Vitra International Furniture Museum outside Basel, finished in 1989 The almost simultaneous openings of the Guggenheim and the Getty last fall sheared architectural time, like tectonic plates breaking past each other, the respective idea a whole s responding to completely different underlying forces. allowing each is an abstract piece of architecture, the sum of two units designs are a paradigm apart. Meier's Getty which quiets on a rationally grided plinth of stone, embraces permanence and stasis; Gehry's Guggenheim, seeming to rise from a plinth of water along the Nervion River, addresses change, move and uncertainty. The differences have major implications for each museum's impact upon the viewer, and also for the way art is displayed and perceived in the sum of two units contrasting structures.

For the committee, Meier's work was a known quantity, with bottoms in Le Corbusier's Purist period of the 1920 From his first white remembrancers in the 1970s, Meier reiterated the design principles of modernism's early heroic period -- plays of light and shadow, transparency and opacity, solid and void, line and plane. His interpretation proffered nothing fundamentally new, but it did show a latter-day evolutionary branch and a late form of modernist beauty. by means of the time he landed the Getty cast Meier had already established his signature interpretation with a high step of refinement and conceptual resolution in like projects as the Atheneum in of recent origin Harmony, Indiana (1975), and the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt (1979) the one and the other deft exercises in lyricism, visual porosity and spatial complexity. His was a highly estheticized form of modernism real distant from its functionalist lower parts and original social agenda.

Modernism's vanity is that, being predicated upon invention rather than convention, it could hardly be supersed through anything newer than its progressive self on the contrary two phenomena have dislocated modernism's presumptions of innovation. After decades of exposing to the International Style and its descendants, the organ of vision of the educated, museum-going American has become attuned to crisp cutting sides and clean planes: modernism's has become a comfort manner of writing By the 1990s, Meier's white constructions were familiar, easy to like and unchallenging -- an esthetic of choice for civic and corporate throw outs in Europe and America.

on the contrary the more immediate dislocation occurr last fall in the short space of a brace of months. Gehry's chaotic Guggenheim Museum Bilbao hit Meier's Getty like a billiard ball, displacing the Getty as the progressive token of its time. During the protracted development period of the California cast architecture's center of gravity shifted, sending the composite and refined design of the Getty toward the conservative extreme point of the spectrum. No longer signifying discovery, or plane inquiry, Meier's modernism was no longer contemporary.

In the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of a Los Angeles site reminiscent of the Acropolis in Athens, the classicism latent in Meier's modernism also emerg Any architect who bases his work upon Le Corbusier (himself inspired through the Parthenon) is bound to absorb aspects of the classical impulse -- notions of regularity, purity, mathematical harmonious flow balance and idealism. Meier's buildings don't have to direct the eye classical to be classicizing. Furthermore, Meier's collaged multibuilding plan recalls Hadrian's Villa, individual of the most intriguing complexe of the ancient world. ultimate parts similar to those of the Getty's transcript in Malibu of the Roman Villa dei Papiri were also grafted onto his design: the courtyard of the novel museum recalls Malibu's long peristyle garden, and the two-story inner peristyle from Malibu reappears repeatedly in Meier's tiered pavilions. Looking back from the museum's internal court, the entrance rotunda -- depite all the glass and square metal panels -- bears a resemblance to Bramante's undisturbed Doric-style Tempietto in Rome.