Getty Center

The **Getty Center,** located in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, is a campus founded by oilman J. Paul Getty. It is used for cultural exhibitions.  

The center which cost $1.3 billion to build opened on December 16, 1997. 

People like its architecture, gardens, and views overlooking the Los Angeles. It is located at the top of a hill. Entrances to the building include traveling from a visitor's parking garage at the bottom of the hill. Alternatively, it also has a three-car cable-pulled tram. 

## Visitors 
The center draws 1.3 million visitors annually. 

## Exhibits 
One of the paintings on display is *Irises* by Vincent van Gogh. Besides the museum, the center's buildings house the Getty Research Institute (GRI), the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the administrative offices of the J. Paul Getty Trust. The Trust owns and operates the center. 

It also has outdoor sculptures displayed on terraces and in gardens. The center was designed by architect Richard Meier. The campus includes a central garden designed by artist Robert Irwin. 

GRI's separate building contains a research library with over 900,000 volumes and two million photographs of art and architecture. The center's design included special provisions to address concerns regarding earthquakes and fires.

## Location and history
 satellite image of the Getty Center. The circular building to the left is the Getty Research Institute. The two buildings at the top are the Getty Trust administrative offices and the rest is the museum.]]The Getty Museum started in J. Paul Getty's house in Pacific Palisades in 1954. He made the house larger by adding a new section. In the 1970s, Getty built a copy of an Italian villa near his home. 

This new building was a better place to keep his art collection. It opened as a museum in 1974. After Getty died in 1976, all of the land and buildings were given to the Getty Trust to be used as museum space. However, the collection grew too big for the site.  The people running the museum looked for a new location closer to Los Angeles. 

In 1983, the Trust bought the land where the center is now. The new campus has  on a  site in the Santa Monica Mountains above Interstate 405, surrounded by  kept in a natural state. The land cost $25 million. The top of the hill is  above I-405.  So, on a clear day it is possible to see not only the Los Angeles skyline but also the San Bernardino Mountains to the east as well as the Pacific Ocean to the west.

## Construction 
In 1984, Richard Meier was chosen to be the architect of the center. It took a several years to get permits to build the Getty Center. starting in August 1989. 

The construction was significantly delayed, with the planned completion date moved from 1988 to 1995 (in 1990). By 1995, however, the campus was described as only "more than halfway complete". Although the total project cost was estimated to be $350 million in 1990, After the center opened, the villa closed for extensive renovations and reopened on January 28, 2006, to focus on the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria. Currently, the museum displays collections at both the Getty Center and the site (called the Getty Villa) in Pacific Palisades.

In 2005, the *Los Angeles Times* printed a series of articles about how the Getty Trust and its president Dr. Barry Munitz were spending money. The California Attorney General investigated the Getty Trust and found that no laws had been broken. The trust agreed to appoint a person from outside the Trust to review how money would be spent in the future. The Getty Trust experienced financial difficulties in 2008 and 2009 and cut 205 of 1,487 budgeted staff positions to reduce expenses. Although the Getty Trust endowment reached $6.4 billion in 2007, it dropped to $4.5 billion in 2009.

## Architecture 
 in the background]]
Meier has exploited the two naturally-occurring ridges (which diverge at a 22.5 degree angle) by overlaying two grids along these axes. These grids serve to define the space of the campus while dividing the import of the buildings on it. Along one axis lie the galleries and along the other axis lie the administrative buildings. Meier emphasized the two competing grids by constructing strong view lines through the campus. The main north-south axis starts with the helipad, then includes a narrow walkway between the auditorium and north buildings. 

The axis continues past the elevator kiosk to the tram station. The axis goes through the rotunda, past the walls and support columns of the exhibitions pavilion, and finally the ramp besides the west pavilion and the central garden. Its corresponding east-west visual axis starts with the edge of the scholar's wing of the Getty Research Institute (GRI), the walkway between the central garden and the GRI, and the overlook to the azalea pool in the central garden. The east-west axis then follows the walkway between the central garden and the west pavilion, and finally the north wall of the west pavilion and the courtyard between the south and east pavilions.

The main axes of the museum grid that is offset by 22.5 degrees begins with the arrival plaza, carries through the edge of the stairs up to the main entrance, aligns with the columns supporting the rotunda as well as the center point of the rotunda, aligns with travertine benches in the courtyard between the pavilions, includes a narrow walkway between the west and south pavilions, a staircase down to the cactus garden and ends in the garden. The corresponding cross axis starts with the center point of the circle forming the GRI library garden, then passing to the center of the entrance rotunda, and aligning with the south wall of the rotunda building. Although all of the museum is aligned on these alternative axes, portions of the exhibitions pavilion and the east pavilion are aligned on the true north-south axis as a reminder that both grids are present in the campus.

The primary grid structure is a  square; most wall and floor elements are  squares or some derivative thereof. The buildings at the Getty Center are made from concrete and steel with either travertine or aluminium cladding. The collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum on display at the Getty Center includes "pre-20th-century European paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, and decorative arts; and 19th- and 20th-century American and European photographs". The literal translation of the Tahitian words of the title are "noble" and "sleeping eyes", which implies "death".
* *Irises* by Vincent Van Gogh (1889). The museum purchased the painting in 1990; it had sold for $53.9 million in 1987.
* *Portrait of a Halberdier* by Pontormo (1528–1530). When the museum bought the painting for $35.2 million at an auction in 1989, "the price more than tripled the previous record at auction for an Old Master painting".
* A copy of *Portrait of Louis XIV*, which measures 114 x 62-5/8&nbsp;inches, by the workshop of Hyacinthe Rigaud (after 1701).
Getty's photograph collection is on the lower level of the west pavilion. It includes 35,000 individual prints, 1,500 daguerreotypes and other cased objects, 30,000 stereographs and cartes-de-visite, and 475 albums containing almost 40,000 mounted prints.

The museum building has a three-level base building that is closed to the public and provides staff workspace and storage areas. Five public, two-story towers on the base are called the North, East, South, West and the Exhibitions Pavilions. The Exhibitions Pavilion acts as the temporary residence for traveling art collections and the Foundation's artwork for which the permanent pavilions have no room. The permanent collection is displayed throughout the other four pavilions chronologically: the north houses the oldest art while the west houses the newest. The first-floor galleries in each pavilion house light-sensitive art, such as illuminated manuscripts, furniture, or photography. Computer-controlled skylights on the second-floor galleries allow paintings to be displayed in natural light. The second floors are connected by a series of glass-enclosed bridges and open terraces. The bridges and terraces both offer views of the surrounding hillsides and central plaza. Sculpture is also on display at various points outside the buildings, including on various terraces and balconies. The lower level (the highest of the floors in the base) includes a public cafeteria, the terrace cafe, and the photography galleries.

## Central Garden 
The  Central Garden at the Getty Center is the work of artist Robert Irwin. Planning for the garden began in 1992, construction started in 1996, and the garden was completed in December 1997.

Irwin was quoted as saying that the Central Garden "is a sculpture in the form of a garden, which aims to be art." Water plays a major role in the garden. A fountain near the restaurant flows toward the garden and appears to fall into a grotto on the north garden wall. The resulting stream then flows down the hillside into the azalea pool. The designers placed rocks and boulders of varying size in the stream bed to vary the sounds from the flowing water. A tree-lined stream descends to a plaza, while the walkway criss-crosses the stream, which continues through the plaza, and goes over a stone waterfall into a round pool.

## Getty Research Institute (GRI) 
The Getty Research Institute (GRI) is "dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts." Among other holdings, GRI's research library contains over 900,000 volumes of books, periodicals, and auction catalogs; special collections; and two million photographs of art and architecture. GRI's other activities include exhibitions, publications, and a residential scholars program. The round building encircles a landscaped garden and is to the west of the central garden. The main entrance of GRI is connected by a terrace to the main arrival court of the museum, with outdoor sculptures placed along the route. It "serves the conservation community through scientific research, education and training, model field projects, and the dissemination of the results of both its own work and the work of others in the field" and "adheres to the principles that guide the work of the Getty Trust: service, philanthropy, teaching, and access".

The Getty Foundation awards grants for "the understanding and preservation of the visual arts". In addition, it runs the Getty Leadership Institute for "current and future museum leaders". Its offices are north of the museum. It caused "disturbing hairline cracks... in the welds and plated joints of the steel framework." As a result, the steelwork through the site was retrofitted. The native flammable chaparral was removed and fire-resistant poverty weed was added to the slopes around the center.

At the north end of the center, a tank with  of water, together with a grass-covered helipad, allow helicopters to collect water. The access ramp from the entry plaza to the museum was constructed to allow a fire truck to pass over it.

## Panoramic view looking south 
## References 
## Further reading 
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## Other websites 
* J. Paul Getty Trust official website
* Architecture of the Getty Center (800 photographs categorized by location and by subject of photograph)
* Gardens of the Getty Center  (LandLiving.com)
* Microsoft Virtual Earth view of the Center at a different angle