The Getty Villa

"The Getty Villa" is a lively history of the Getty Museum, its renowned antiquities collections, and its growth from a small museum in a ranch house in Malibu to its first home in a building designed to replicate what we know of the Villa dei Papiri, an ancient Roman villa partially uncovered in Herculaneum. 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 theatre, 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 challenges, and legal hurdles, all of which ultimately have resulted in a truly unique and beautiful 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 250 reproductions of works of art, the old and the new Getty Museum, site plans, and architectural elevations.