A Benedictine chronicler once wrote of a "white mantle of churches" stretched across medieval France. In a related way, America in the past century has mantled itself with museums, as the temple of art gradually replaced the church as the emblematic focus of civic self-esteem. Now, two grand projects by leading American architects, utterly different from each other in purpose, appearance and design philosophy, may be said to mark the climax of the age of American museum expansion. One is in Los Angeles and opens officially in December--though small flotillas of previewing VIPS have been trawling through it for the past few months. The other, already open, is under American management but is set in Bilbao, in the Basque region of northern Spain. Neither is likely to have any architectural rivals in what is left of the 20th century, or for a good slice of the early 21st.
In Los Angeles, after 14 years, the Leviathan surfaces at last: Moby Museum, a.k.a. the Getty Center, sheathed in light tan aluminum and elegantly rugged honey-colored Italian travertine, nearly 1 million sq. ft. of it at roughly $1,000 per sq. ft., designed by Richard Meier and perched on a 710-acre hilltop above the San Diego Freeway in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. The Getty is the most expensive arts complex and by some calculations the most expensive building in American history. Large expectations ride on it as both a cultural institution and an emblematic focus for Los Angeles itself. Meanwhile, Frank Gehry's $100 million Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao opened two weeks ago. Built and financed by the Basque regional government, it is essentially a franchise: a major step in the effort by Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York City, to parlay his museum into an international network of satellites exhibiting art from a common pool--an innovative idea that is still viewed with a good deal of skepticism by more traditional museum officials.
The Getty is not "a building." There are moments, both off site and on, when its collection of six separate units on a ridge linked by plazas and terraces resembles a very honed and buffed Modernist version of an Italian hill town. Architect Meier himself has grown wary of the hill-town analogy. "Think of it," he says, "as a small college campus with different departments, some more visible than others--not a museum but an institution in which art predominates."
Meier, 63, has come up with a superb piece of place making. When the Epcot-style tram delivers you from the parking garage at the bottom to the plaza at the top of the ridge, you step out into a space that seems both amiable and Utopian, dignified but, despite its acreage of travertine, not authoritarian: a respite from the visual chaos of Los Angeles, but offering the best views a public could have of the city spread below.