The Getty Villa is a lively history of the J. Paul Getty Museum and its renowned antiquities collections, its growth from a small museum in Mr. Getty's house in Malibu to its first home in the Villa building, and its third incarnation as a museum exclusively devoted to antiquities. Most engagingly, this book records the ten-year adventure in reconfiguring a beautiful but topographically challenging site into one that could continue to accommodate the splendid Museum building and also provide for an outdoor theater, laboratories for conservation work and research, offices for staff and visiting scholars, and an education program for adults and children.
This is a story of architectural imagination, geographical hurdles, and legal obstacles, all of which ultimately have resulted in a truly unique and breathtaking site. And while this story may be of only one project in one place, to anyone interested in architecture and in the difficulties posed by building on a grand scale in the twenty-first century, the story told by True and Silvetti is an enlightening and rewarding one, and it is illustrated with more than 250 reproductions of works of art, images of the old and the new Getty Museum, site plans, and architectural elevations.