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Born in 1934, the prominent American architect Richard Meier is best known for the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In all his work he refuses to bend to the trends of modern architecture. He has won many awards including the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, considered the field's highest honor. [Listener: Massimo Vignelli; date recorded: 2004]
TRANSCRIPT: There’s a museum and they had a collection which was evolving... changing. There's something called the Center for the History of Art and Humanities, which is a place for scholars and probably the greatest art library in the world. There’s a Conservation Institute, which is not only conservation of works of art within the museum but, you know, how do... how do you preserve the mummies for the next 500 years? So it’s interested in conservation at every level and throughout the world. Then there’s an administration for the Getty and all of these different departments are, sort of, just beginning and trying to figure out what their mission is and what their space requirements are. And we only have so much space, so we have to, kind of, divide it up among the different entities of the Getty Trust and then there’s the public and so we have, you know, restaurant and cafeteria, and facilities for the public. And then, how do you get to the top of the hill because the building's at the top of the hill but there’s no room at the top to park the cars, so we had to park at the bottom of the hill and it’s a long way, you know, to ask people to walk. So we have to figure out the movement system from the bottom of the hill to the top of the hill and we have a tram, and all of these things. And then there’s a community and the community said to us, you know, we’re delighted that the Getty is going to build here. Whatever you do is fine as long as we can’t see it, and we can’t hear it and we can’t smell it. So they had their requirements. And it’s, sort of, balancing all of these different factors and trying to make everything come together that made it take that long.
