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Brentwood, California
Go on take everything, take everything, I want you to
All is quiet at Richard Meier's Getty Center where the cacti and stone yet again fail to be impressed by the constantly breathing 405 and all those endless, twinkling burbclaves.
Over the years my feelings about the Getty Center have shifted past a grudging appreciation to a real admiration. There are pieces of it that I still like more than others but as a whole it still holds up after so many visits. To illustrate such slow shifts I have three quotes, dying remnants of old saved slideshows, proof of what I thought seven, four, two years ago isn't always what I think now.
"My parking reservations at the Getty Center allowed me to arrive between 530 and 630; local friday night traffic on the 405 brought me to the Getty closer to 630, well past dark. I parked in the garage, rode the funicular up to the top of the mountain, arrived in the unspectacular plaza and started to explore. The building got a lot nicer the deeper I looked, it wasn't the typical skin deep Meier building, and the stone- the stone. I liked the stone, ok. The garden however totally sucks." - from "Mountain in the shadow of light" (December 1998)
"From the occasionally successful gardens up to the mostly wonderful rough stone veneer of the galleries, the Getty Center has always confused me. I don't like its collection (I've always been hesitant to like any art completed prior to the onslaught of mechanized war), its funicular concept is weak, its opening plaza not as grand as promised, and the gardens are famously inconsistent. On the other hand the stone remains mostly wonderful, the main courtyard is impressive and the arbitrary curves and reveals are handled in professional enough of a manner to make me think that they work despite my strong ingrained prejudices. Depending on my mood, the clarity of my recollections, even the company I'm keeping, I find I either really like or hate this place.” - from "The sun struggles up, another beautiful day" (January 2002)
"Perched high atop Brentwood and the 405, just south of Sepulveda Pass is the Getty Center, the six (or seven) year old, billion dollar complex of museums and gardens meant to house a rather expensive collection of rather boring art. The complex (designed by New York architect Richard Meier) is reachable by a magical little train ride that unfortunately parallels a much less magical little service road... It was cloudy and cool (mid 60s) in Brentwood that January day, creating unusually soft lighting conditions across Meier's trademark white panels and all that stone. The stone came from Italy, supposedly the same quarry that furnished the Coliseum in Rome. A special method was developed for cutting the blocks, allowing wonderfully different, jagged faces at every turn, and possibly contributing to that hefty billion dollar price tag." - from "They'll see us waving from such great heights" (February 2004)
While fate caused me to miss Jean Prouve's tropical house rebuilt in New Haven (I was there just as they were starting to rebuild it), I did manage to catch it in the courtyard of the Hammer Museum, a small but interesting free gallery (with surprisingly few actual hammers) that featured temporary exhibits and Armand Hammer's personal all-over-the-map art collection.
If you think I couldn't get any more obscure than Jean Prouve you are sadly mistaken. Finishing up this first day of pictures is a lone image of Neil Denari's actually built screening room for the Endeavor Talent Agency, a block off of Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. If you missed Neil Denari's rambling lecture in New Haven last month (and you did), you missed an otherwise earnest sounding man overuse big, smart sounding, often imaginary words to explain little while showing a few interesting images (including a completely overthought apartment tower destined for W23 Street at the High Line) that generally spoke for themselves.
No Los Angeles slideshow would be complete without at least one picture of Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, with just enough shiny, shiny metal, arbitrary curves and badly constructed details for everyone to love. The reason that the building always remains worthy of a visit is due to a public path that circles the building a few stories up, ducking and weaving between all of the shiny, shiny metal, arbitrary curves and badly constructed details- offering just enough rare glimpses at hidden amphitheaters, sections of structure behind the curves and into otherwise forbidden sections of the lobby to make you want to come back again and again.
You know a building is successful when a guy on stilts dresses up like the building to entertain children.
A last picture, a Serra like glimpse into the path as the light continues to bleed between metal and sky,
Four final (final) images of that path that circles the Walt Disney Concert Hall, that path I keep writing about, that path I keep taking pictures of, that path that I keep insisting is reason alone to brave a visit to downtown Los Angeles.
