Detail of travertine floor at the Getty Center. Photo: Quintin Lake

Museum entrance hall seen from the entrance plaza. Getty Center. Photo: Quintin Lake

Visitor shadows on the restaurant at the Getty Center. Photo: Quintin Lake

Family room facade detail of polished and rough cut travertine. Getty Center. Photo: Quintin Lake

Curving Brise soleil by the cafe. Getty Center. Photo: Quintin Lake

Exhibitions Pavilion with a view to Los Angeles. Getty Center. Photo: Quintin Lake

Family room reflected in the west pavilion. Getty Center. Photo: Quintin Lake

Sunset on the Detail of travertine cladding. Getty Center. Photo: Quintin Lake

The Family Room and reflection. Getty Center. Photo: Quintin Lake

Looking up the Family Room facade. Getty Center. Photo: Quintin Lake

Richard Meier’s Getty center in LA is symphony of pale forms and surface texture which are brought to life by the the beautiful LA light and the immaculate condition in which the building in maintained.

In Andreas Papadakis and James Steele, Architecture of Today (Paris: Terrail, 1991) Meier is quoted as saying:

Architecture is the subject of my architecture…What I seek to do is pursue the plastic limits of modern architecture to include a notion of beauty moulded by light. My wish is to create a kind of spatial lyricism within the canon of pure form. In the design of my buildings, I am expanding and elaborating on what I consider to be the formal base of the Modern Movement…The great promise and richness of some of the formal tenets of Modernism have almost unlimited areas for investigation…I work with volume and surface, I manipulate forms in light, changes in scale and view, movement and stasis.

VIEW MORE / BUY PRINTS / LICENSE IMAGES of the Getty Center here >>