June 8, 2006
Later in the day, we headed to the Getty Villa in Malibu, where we met Bradley Johnson from Machado and Silvetti’s office, the Mexican salad from lunch still clinging to the dental work. He and Zoltan Pali, whose firm SPF:a was the executive architect, met us at the Visitors' Center, a powerfully compressed space. Although I had spent considerable amount of time around the opening of the Getty Center, this was a first visit to the Villa, an idyllic property up a canyon just off the Pacific Coast Highway.
What a scrumptious sight. All that vegetation, all that money so artfully deployed to create an Eden in concrete and stone. The architects seemed to have worked at two scales—a sort of muscular heroic, in which beefy walls step along canyon walls, offering heft and a clearly articulated step up the canyon walls, then cascading down the hillsides in a series of cascades. At the same time, the hybrid project includes a wealth of detailing that would make an emperor blush: Italian marble that glows from within, bronze fittings and entire walls of glazing, hand-crafted sconces and fittings, and more varieties of concrete than you could have imagined existed. Black marble flows like water on flat surfaces; Turkish onyx caps a wall. All that oil money has been frozen in time, transformed into a roman dreamscape that funnels inside to the displays, climatically and seismically stabilized.
The juxtaposition of materials, which are extreme in number and kind, provoke a cacophony of responses on first glance, and the aesthetic choices sometimes confront one another like atonal music, crying out that more may not mean more. Where excess counts, sometimes, more is less. The ultra-refinement of detailing and materials contrasts throughout with the heroic architectural interventions, carving a rambling processional throughout the site, creating a kind of Pacific paradise of lush vegetation, flowering trees and plants, and splashing pools. Spatially more complex than a photograph, plying the line between sun, shade, and shadow, this intensely designed complex brings out the Croesus envy in the most ardent democrat: money can't buy you love, but oh, what only money can buy.
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