ARCHITECTURE : Neither Museum nor Mausoleum, Getty Comes Close to Pure Vision

The peristyle garden of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu is about as close to Eden as you can get in Los Angeles. Like a little piece of “Lost Horizons,” this perfect rectangle of classical columns and pristine water lies nestled in a lush canyon. Plants, marble and stucco compose themselves into gentle geometries, while the world outside disappears into sea, sky and mountain.

This is not Los Angeles, nor is it the Roman resort of Herculaneum. It is not really a museum, nor is it a mausoleum to an oil baron. It is as close to pure vision as architecture ever comes, a carefully contrived pastiche floating over a sea of parking, divorcing you from reality and giving you a mythical place in return.

You don’t have to suspend belief to be seduced by the Getty. Taking care of that is the process of getting a parking permit, the winding driveway, the tomblike parking garage, the rise up to the wood beams of the pergola at the front of the museum, the columns that confront you at the top and the completeness of the garden. It makes sense, step by choreographed step.

The Getty staff goes at great lengths to explain how this 1974 building is “based on” an actual antique model: the Villa del Papiri, a Roman mansion destroyed in the AD 79 eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. But this is no house. It is a steel-framed cultural facility, complete with elevators, bathrooms, climate-controlled galleries and a gift shop.

Every major piece of the building is based on some classical element, from the fluorescent-lighted compluvium that is supposed to stand in for a skylight, to the coffers on the ceilings and the stylized paintings of plants on the walls. The brilliance of the design team, made up of archeologists and historians under the guidance of the Orange County firm of Langdon Wilson and landscape architect Emmett Wemple is that they managed to control both their faraway sources and the needs of a modern institution to such a degree that you almost never see a seam.

Sometimes, however, it doesn’t work, as when you move from the gracious entry hall into the dimly lit fire stairs that take you up to the second-floor galleries. Or when you find yourself looking at Van Gogh’s “Irises” in the air-conditioned banality of the upstairs gallery. It is at times like these that the whole project seems a little absurd. What, after all, does a Roman villa have to do with a museum? For that matter, what does all this art have to do with Malibu? What gave Getty the right to collect all this stuff and plunk it down in this ravine?

The answer, of course, is nothing, which is why he had to have this elaborate architectural narrative created. It justifies the existence of the place by telling a mighty good story--one for which Getty himself wrote the script in a 1955 novella he published, “A Journey To Corinth.”

The Getty Museum is the most successful example of postmodern architecture we have in the area.

This form of eclectic design organizes into good stories the vast amounts of imagery that bombard us in the Information Age. We get coherent images that can be pasted over any office building, home or museum.

Some have said that Langdon Wilson learned its tricks from Disneyland, the magical kingdom that was the forerunner of what we, during the 1980s, thought of as the architectural avant-garde.

Whether the sources were high art, popular art or architectural desires to use high art imagery to tell popularly understood stories, the result is a real crowd pleaser. Sitting in the garden, you feel as if architecture, endowed with enough resources, can make a perfect world, even if it has to hide or ignore the reality lurking underneath its concrete deck or beyond the hills.

The Getty Trust is currently building a new facility in Brentwood that will house all the museum’s non-classical artworks. Completion of the new museum is expected by the end of the decade.