Fleshing Out the Getty

NEW YORK —  As the 20th century draws to a close, we seem to have entered a more forgiving period, aesthetically speaking. The heated conflict between those who believe that ornament is, as Viennese architect Adolf Loos once put it, “crime” and those who hunger for floral motifs and cornices has lapsed into a state of deetente.

A case in point: the Getty Center, which perches the ridge line of the Santa Monica Mountains like an over-nourished Italian hill town. The Getty Museum, and the rest of the buildings on the 24-acre campus, were designed by die-hard modernist Richard Meier but are a departure from the architect’s Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills or his Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. Those institutions, like most Meier museums, are done inside and out in Meier’s trademark white. Not just plain old white, but the white of 1950s kitchen appliances; a white that is commonly described as “crisp.” Not so the Getty. Its exterior is clad largely in travertine stone the color of whole wheat toast.

Inside the galleries of the Getty Museum’s five pavilions, the Meier palate would dictate a white so cool that it feels as if the artworks were not just displayed, but refrigerated. However, inside this museum, there will be rooms that display antique furniture against orangey velvet wall fabric or paintings against plaster that has been tinted a deep blue-gray.

Meier, the modernist, has been joined in the interior design of the Getty Museum by another architect, classicist Thierry Despont, a man deeply immersed in a dream of another century.

That the Getty has brought in Despont to soften Meier’s hard edges, to make a group of somewhat astringent late 20th century buildings hospitable to the overripe furniture of 18th century France and the subtly hued drawings of Renaissance masters, has won the project no new friends in the architectural press. “An astonishing loss of nerve,” grumbles Martin Filler in Architecture Magazine.

John Walsh, director of the Getty Museum, shrugs off such slights. He insists that the interior design “was never even an issue. We wouldn’t have hired him [Meier] if there was any thought of it being a white museum inside.”

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Thierry Despont is the exact opposite of Richard Meier. The interiors he concocts for his immensely wealthy clients are a swirl of highly focused, carefully edited clutter. He harvests objects from history and carefully juxtaposes them: an indoor pool surrounded by a colonnade features a simple toy sailboat floating on still water; a chaise such as Thomas Jefferson might have owned becomes the centerpiece of a lavish marble bathroom; a freshly constructed 18th-century-style house is decorated with custom-woven copies of 200-year-old fabrics and dotted with antique globes.

Despont and his 40 employees work in a 1920s building that was once a bank in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood, just down the street from Robert De Niro’s small empire of stylish restaurants. The lobby is dominated by a pedestal-mounted model of an impossibly vast house designed for a client in Palm Beach, Fla. You have to look behind it to find the receptionist. A separate pedestal holds a scale model of a private screening room for a different house in Palm Beach. It is an Art Deco fantasia outfitted with plush, streamlined armchairs, quilted walls and a gold-leafed ceiling.

That Despont and Meier are working on the same project is nothing short of amazing. Imagine if Frank Lloyd Wright had designed a museum and collaborated on the interiors with Julia Morgan, architect of San Simeon.

Despont tells a story about going to visit Meier for the first time, walking into the architect’s pure white office with Getty Museum director Walsh. Despont brought along a fabric sample, a florid red damask. Walsh, Despont recalls, cautioned him: “Thierry, this is like a grenade.”

Walsh’s memory of the moment is slightly different: “I said, ‘Thierry, no terrorist tactics, please.’ ” Despont, however, has no need for extreme tactics. A slim man with an intelligent face dominated by a pair of thick-framed, mustard-hued tortoise shell glasses, he possesses the quick smile and easy charm that are as vital to the success of a designer as a good eye. At lunch, while cheerfully devouring a thin-crust pizza that has anchovies the way a Busby Berkeley routine has chorus girls, Despont declares: “I have always been happy and lucky.”

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Raised in Limoges, France, Despont, 48, graduated from Paris’ School of Beaux Arts in 1972, after the upheaval of the late 1960s had forced the venerable institution to change; architects no longer had to draw their thesis, but wrote theoretical papers instead. Despont drew. He still draws. Not just watercolors of his clients’ rooms. But for pleasure. He illustrated a limited-edition book of Rimbaud’s poems with ragged, expressionistic charcoal drawings that express a dark side one can’t locate in his demeanor or in his work. In an age when most architectural firms render by computer, Despont does things by hand.

“Every Monday, we have drawing lessons,” Despont says, “and anyone in the office who comes, draws. For architects, drawings are so important. If you don’t know how to draw, if your hand and brain are not coordinated, you can’t express sophistication.”

Perhaps Despont is an anachronism, but he serves a very modern function. His clients have included Calvin and Kelly Klein and Leslie Wexner, chairman of the Limited. His most famous client, at the moment, is Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Despont is designing the interiors for Gates’ high-tech palace on Lake Washington near Seattle. He is contractually obligated to remain silent about that house, but one imagines that he can lend the rooms dominated by electronic reproductions of art masterpieces a warmth they might otherwise lack. Despont represents a counterbalance to the culture of technology that Gates embodies. In this respect, what Despont is presumably doing for Gates is not so different than what he is doing for Richard Meier and the Getty.

“The guardian of memories,” that’s how Despont views the role of the architect. “I love knowing about history,” he says. “You absorb it and forget it, but you have it inside of you.”

In “Houses 1990,” the first of two oversized, lush, limited-edition books he’s assembled to show his work, Despont writes, “I am a classical architect concerned with harmony and order through space, form, and light.

Palladio, Ledoux, Jefferson, Lutyens and Wright are always in my mind, but so are the partitas of Bach, the poetry of Rimbaud and the chestnut trees of Limousin.”

Despont speaks earnestly about “capturing the elements of the perfect house, the dream house one is always after like a writer is always after the great American novel.” His own home, a TriBeCa loft with Art Deco touches, is a work-in-progress. Mostly, Despont can be found on airplanes, flying to Los Angeles, Seattle or Paris, tending to other people’s dreams.

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The Getty project demanded that Despont be a Henry Kissinger of aesthetics, shuttling between the players, convincing Walsh that he didn’t really want damask in the art galleries, persuading Meier that color was not such a bad thing.

When it’s suggested to the museum director that Despont was hired as much for his diplomatic skills as his design prowess, Walsh demurs. “Diplomacy makes it seem like there was some sort of dispute. Richard and I have been in this for a dozen years now. He designed the galleries to our specifications.” Still, Walsh’s own descriptions of the design process make it sound like a certain amount of delicacy was involved.

Walsh, as the director of the world’s richest museum, has no doubt sat through his share of dog-and-pony shows, but he expresses wonderment when describing how Despont presents his work. “He arrives with extremely well-organized people. The drawings come out of a marvelous big, black valise. He does wonderful watercolor renderings. It’s never a take-it-or-leave-it thing.”

Despont was brought in early in the design process of the Getty Museum. In 1988, he was recruited to design the interiors for the museum’s decorative arts galleries. The curators were faced with the problem of how to display furniture, mostly French, and artifacts from the 17th through the 19th centuries in a building that was--theoretically speaking--hostile to the collection. “It wasn’t clear how you would do this,” Walsh says. “How do you weave the two together? How do you deal with the boundaries?”

Despont was chosen not just because his residential designs revealed his sense of history, but because the restoration work he’d done on the Statue of Liberty in 1986 proved he could “take on a large proposition,” Walsh says.

Back in TriBeCa, in a bank vault turned conference room, Despont shows mock-ups of the decorative arts rooms, paintings outfitted with fabric samples. The period rooms are made to flow chronologically so that you can drift through time. Here is a room designed to display tapestry, its walls swaddled in red silk damask and highlighted with faux marble. Here is a room from the Regency Period in the 18th century with floor-to-ceiling French doors, a tall mirror and velvet chairs. The neoclassical room is done in green silk. It’s still shiny, Despont observes, but the geometric pattern foreshadows a modern sensibility.

After Despont proved himself on the decorative arts galleries--and developed a working relationship with Meier--Walsh asked him to take over the selection of the surfaces, materials and finishes for the galleries where the Getty’s collection of art would be hung.

Taciturn Meier--his conversational style is as pared down as his architecture--has only good things to say about what Despont has done with the decorative arts wing. About the art galleries, Meier’s opinion is guarded: “I always felt they should be Modern, but that’s not what the Getty wanted.”

Despont is careful to emphasize that his work on the Getty was a collaboration with Meier: “It’s Richard’s opus,” he says. Along with Meier, he worked with color specialist Donald Kaufman, Walsh and the curators to select a palette for the various art rooms. There are plasters tinted sober tans, greens and blues. There are rich textured fabrics in orange and red.

“Deep colors. No pastels. No California,” Despont comments.

“We’re walking a line between context and modernism throughout the museum,” Walsh notes.

It’s a curious line, drawn with more finesse than it would have been during the postmodern era. Still, it’s a line that many think has no business existing. Either you hire Meier and make everything white, or you hire a different architect. In Despont’s opinion, the meeting of his and Meier’s world views was possible because the “violence of the architectural debate” has finally subsided.

That violence, a century-long storm of rhetoric, never really penetrated Despont’s happy, well-upholstered world. “Architecture,” he writes, “is meant to be experienced and not talked about.”