Those of us who care about the Getty Museum and Villa have been haunted by the horrifying videos of wildfires raging close to the Villa, a re-creation of a Roman country home, which houses the museum’s Greek and Roman antiquities:
Image from the Getty
The Villa is currently hosting an exhibition of Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece (to Mar. 3), but it’s closed (through Jan.13), due to the Franklin Fire in Malibu.
To calm our fears for the art, the buildings and, especially, the people, the Getty posted on its website Jan. 8 this Updated Statement from Getty President and CEO Katherine E. Fleming Regarding Palisades Fire:
While trees and vegetation on the property have burned, Getty structures have been unaffected, and thankfully, both staff and the collections are safe….On Tuesday morning, the Villa was swiftly closed to non-emergency staff and, in any case, was closed to the public on Tuesdays. Fortunately, Getty had made extensive efforts to clear brush from the surrounding area as part of its fire mitigation efforts throughout the year. Additional fire prevention measures in place at the Villa include water storage on-site. Irrigation was immediately deployed in parts of the grounds Tuesday morning. Museum galleries and library archives were sealed off from smoke by state-of-the-art air handling systems. The double-walled construction of the galleries also provides significant protection for the collections.
All well and good. But the reports and videos we’ve been seeing make it appear that the surrounding area is engulfed by smoke and flames. And from what I’ve seen online at this writing, things are not yet improving.
The Getty and I go back a long way: I covered the 1998 opening of the Richard Meier-designed Getty Center in a seven-page appraisal for Art in America magazine (“View from the Getty,” May 1998, for which I can find no active link). This may sound self-serving, but you be the judge of whether my first paragraph anticipates the problems to come:
Sounds like a design for disaster: construct a major art complex on a hilltop vulnerable to earthquake, soil erosion and fire. Pick an architect known for an austere modernist style, then insist that he change it. Price the project (in a 1983 letter to the architect) at $75-100 million, then announce after 14 years that it actually cost a cool billion—a budget overrun of a size that the project’s officials had repeatedly and publicly insisted could never occur.
Let’s not ever talk about the dangers of installing masterpieces on a fault line. (Nevertheless, let’s learn a little about the Getty’s use of Hidden Seismic Retrofitting.)
Here’s what was then said about fire risk (from another passage in my 1998 article):
The fire risk of this particular hilltop was well known from the conflagration that had jumped the neighboring freeway in 1961. “You could still see the charred remains,” Meier told Art in America [aka: Lee Rosenbaum] at the time of the Getty opening. “Because of this, we have used all fire-retardant plant material. The fire will not spread because the plant material is not combustible,” he asserted. Somewhat less confident, [Stephen] Rountree [then director of operations] acknowledged that the new plantings were “less volatile than what was here,” but he added that “every summer we will clear out the underbrush,” to diminish the risk.
They formerly used live, munching goats to help “clear our the underbrush.” But a Getty spokesperson, in response to my recent query, wrote: “The goats are no longer working for us! We stopped using them in the early 2010s.”
Watching the videos of the infernal inferno nearby, we can only hope that what is now being done by men and machines to defend the Getty will prove equal to the task.
