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The diversified Getty envisioned by Williams and the trust had to be, in every conceivable way, a class act. After the original list of 33 architects had been whittled down to three finalists, the committee in 1984 settled on the New York City-based Meier, America's chief exponent of "late Modernist" classicism. He was the one who, it was believed, could deliver an impeccable and thoughtful level of planning and detailing. One of the factors in Meier's favor was that even then he was an experienced museum designer (the Frankfort Museum for Decorative Arts, 1979-85; the High Museum in Atlanta, 1980-83).
Now the hard stuff began. With Walsh, Williams and other members of the building committee, Meier went all over the world studying museums and monuments, from the Certosa near Florence to the Glyptothek in Munich, from the Villa Lante in Bagnaia (a distant memory of whose watercourse is preserved in one of the Getty's gardens, designed by the California artist Robert Irwin) to key American museums, such as the National Gallery in Washington and the Yale Center for British Art. "This," says Meier dryly in his memoir Building the Getty, to be published next month by Random House, "generated a great deal of discussion about what we ought to avoid."
Most intractable of all was the task that faced Meier and Stephen Rountree, the director of the building program, in getting a conditional-use permit from the city of Los Angeles. This entailed dealing with scores of regulations; no excavated earth, for instance, could be moved off the site. It also meant interminable meetings, sometimes verging on the rancorous, with associations of homeowners in the surrounding areas of Bel Air and Brentwood.
The list of conditions met to get the permit to break ground eventually ran to 107 items. Some were major design considerations. The neighbors didn't want Meier's signature white surfaces glaring at them in the Pacific sun, and the metal cladding panels were accordingly colored a pale tan. They insisted on, and got, strict limits to the height of the buildings. And they hated the idea of culture-curious hoi polloi, 1.3 million of them expected each year, looking down into their backyards. One woman feared that visitors to the Getty would look across the valley from a spur on the site and see her sunbathing by her pool. Meier took her up to this promontory and asked her to point out her house. She gazed about. "I can't see it right now," she said, "but I know it's out there somewhere." The vantage point was turned into a cactus garden whose spines would discourage the feet of the prurient.
"Richard wanted the freedom to play with heights," says Rountree. "He doesn't like having to fight over issues of what color things are. He was driven nuts by the process, and it took time." Time and, by Meier's count, some 300 round-trip flights between New York and Los Angeles--plus living off and on in a "dark, rat-infested, Raymond Chandlery house on the Getty site." During those 14 years "my children grew up, my hair turned whiter, and many friends lost touch with me. In Los Angeles I was forced to develop an entirely new approach in my work. I was picked for the Getty on my record--but on the condition that I broke with my past." Still, what architect will have such a commission again?