The Getty Center was designed by Richard Meier between 1984 and 1997 for the J. Paul Getty Trust on a twenty-four-acre site on a Brentwood ridgeline above the 405 freeway. Construction took thirteen years and produced a campus of six interconnected pavilions: a museum, a research institute, a grant administration building, a conservation institute, an auditorium, and a restaurant and visitor centre.
The plan is organised along a curving spine that follows the contour of the ridge. Two governing axes overlay each other at an angle of twenty-two and a half degrees: a northeast-southwest axis aligned with the ridge, and an east-west axis aligned with the freeway below. The buildings, the plazas, and even the planting beds are organised by this dual grid, producing the characteristic shifted geometries of the campus. The entire complex is set on a thirty-inch modular grid, which governs the dimensions of windows, panel joints, paving, and balustrades. Cladding is split-faced Italian travertine, quarried near Bagni di Tivoli, in panels approximately seventy-six centimetres square. The roughness is deliberate: each panel is cleft along its natural fissure plane rather than smooth-cut, so that fossil inclusions, calcareous striations, and natural irregularities are exposed. Approximately 1.2 million square feet of travertine were used. Where the travertine ends at the upper storeys, the surface continues in white-painted aluminium panels of the same module, producing the characteristic two-tone elevation. Inside the museum, the galleries are arranged as a series of five pavilions of approximately equal size, linked by glazed corridors. Visitors arrive at the foot of the hill, leave their cars in a parking structure, and ride a three-car automated funicular tram up the slope, a separation of the urban and pedestrian realms that turns arrival into a ceremony.
The Getty Center is the last great act of late American modernism. It demonstrates an unwavering commitment to white surfaces, Le Corbusian geometries, and rationalist planning at a moment when most of Meier’s peers had moved on to other languages. It is also one of the rare contemporary museums in which the architecture itself functions as a kind of pilgrimage destination.