My pictures of the Paul Getty Villa

In 1945 oil investor J. Paul Getty purchased a 64 acre site in the beautiful Malibu, Southern California; in 1954 he opened the original Paul Getty Museum in his home to exhibit his collection of Greek and Roman antiquities.

In 1968, Getty decided to re-create a first century Roman country house, the Villa dei Papiri on the Malibu property to display his growing collection of art. This Villa was opened to the public in 1974, and though he followed up all the construction works from England -where he was living-, Getty was never able to visit his own Villa, he died in 1976.

In 1997 the Villa was closed to the public for renovation works, assigned to the Argentine architects Machado-Silvetti, whose main studio is established in Boston. In the meanwhile, the Paul Getty Center, designed by Richard Meier opened to exhibit mostly modern art.

In 2006 the renovated Villa was opened again.

My impression is that the Villa design is a kind of kitsch, you can feel it is not real, except for the Greek and Roman exhibitions.

Anyway, I enjoyed walking around, took a lot of pictures and had a wonderful afternoon.

Regarding the work of Machado-Silvetti, the idea of the archaeological stratification is great, made with expertise, and the details, were excellent. My architect husband says some expensive details by Machado-Silvetti are only understood by architects, maybe he is right, while inside the gift shop, I missed an impressive marble at its corner, a complete piece cut in a slight arch to make a perfect -almost hidden- finish. 

These pictures belong to my archives and please, do not reproduce without my permission.

  

From the web page of Machado-Silvetti:

The project includes the remodeling of the existing J. Paul Getty Museum (a re-creation of the Villa dei Papiri, a first-century Roman country house) to create a new home for the Getty’s permanent collection of antiquities; the transformation of Mr. Getty’s ranch house into a research facility; and the construction of new buildings, public areas, and gardens. The various elements—including the new Entry Pavilion, the Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater, Café, Museum Store, conservation labs, scholar’s library and educational facilities—are conceived as an integral part of the new gardens and outdoor spaces, with the original villa serving as the centerpiece. These new elements are either expressed as stratified retaining walls (such as the Auditorium, the Museum Store, and the conservation labs) or articulated as discrete architectural elements (as is the case with the Entry Pavilion and the Theater). The new architecture neither contrasts nor emulates the architecture of the museum building itself, but defines the character for the new Getty Villa site so that it stands on its own while seeking harmony with all the disparate existing structures, steep topography, the gardens, and public spaces. What had originally been a set of unrelated buildings and paths is now a coherent, harmonious environment. The new architecture transforms the inherent topographical difficulties into an amenity, allowing visitors to wander through the lush site, following the contours of the design and terrain, as if experiencing the drama of an archaeological dig.

http://www.machado-silvetti.com/projects/getty_gardens/index.php

My pictures from the gardens of Rancho Los Alamitos. Long Beach, California

I´ve been visiting Rancho Los Alamitos last weekend and enjoyed the house and gardens.

See the gardens after the restoration:

Rancho Los Alamitos is a microcosm of the regional story. In the intersecting lives of native people, owners and workers who once called this place home and transformed its land is the richness, drama and complexity of California’s legacy. Change and continuity reverberate throughout the history of the Rancho. Sacred ground; water; land for farming, ranching, and real estate; oil; historic open space; as well as people from around the world—all have emerged at the right time to renew and sustain natural and cultural communities, and reshape and renew the Rancho over generations. The continual remix of diversity is the mark of a resilient landscape and accounts for the long, ongoing, beneficial evolution of Rancho Los Alamitos. Today Rancho Los Alamitos is 7.5-acres, a rare vestige of the original 300,000-acre Los Coyotes land concession given to Manuel Nieto in 1790 for his service on the Gaspar de Portolá expedition to California under the Spanish Crown. However, the story of Rancho Los Alamitos precedes these first newcomers, for the historic site is also part of the ancestral village of Povuu’ngna, the traditional place of origin of the native Gabrielino-Tongva people of the Los Angeles Basin, and still a sacred place. Nieto’s vast land holdings included 25,500 acres which in 1833 became Rancho Los Alamitos—Ranch of the Little Cottonwoods. The name suggested its most valuable asset since cottonwoods grow near water, and grew plentifully near the natural springs of Povuu’ngna below the hill. For Nieto, the land was a ranching gem and reward from the Spanish Crown. Subsequent owners Governor José Figueroa and Yankee Don Abel Stearns saw the site as a smart investment and perhaps a haven away from rough Los Angeles. To generations of the Bixby family, the ranch’s last private owners, and the workers, tenant and lease farmers who worked there, Rancho Los Alamitos was an enterprising ranch that would endure for almost a century through the rise of modern-day Long Beach. From the time of ancestral Povuu’ngna through the Spanish-Mexican era of land concessions and grants native workers fueled the Alta California economy. In turn, the early American era owners of Alamitos, like other Yankee dons throughout the state, relied on successive workers from the U.S., Europe, China, and Japan to cultivate fields and raise livestock, and in the twentieth century, depended on labor from Mexico as well as Belgian tenant and Japanese lease farmers. During the 1880’s booming real estate, 5,000 acres of Alamitos land were developed, and by the early twentieth century, Alamitos oil subsidized the remaining 3,600-acre ranch, but the black gold flowed over open space into rampant urban growth. In 1968, the children of Fred and Florence Bixby, the last private owners, donated the family ranch to the City of Long Beach, transforming what had been a working ranch to a public oasis and setting the stage for what Rancho Los Alamitos is today—a place for all time..

http://www.rancholosalamitos.com/history.html

Some works of landscape art by Cornelia Konrads

I´ve been reading at THE DIRT about the landscape works by German artist Cornelia Konrads. I really liked them, so I´m sharing today some pictures posted at The Dirt and the last two of them are from Cornelia´s web site.

¨German artist Cornelia Konrads creates pieces made for a certain place using found local materials. Many feel temporary, perhaps created just long enough to be photographed. Konrads, unlike other land artists though, also has a unique bent on gravity, creating works that defy Newton’s laws. In Passage (see above and below), fine wire or fishing lines hide the underlying machinery.¨

REFERENCES:

http://dirt.asla.org/2012/06/28/cornelia-konrads-moments-of-indecision/

See much more from Cornelia´s 

http://www.cokonrads.de/index.html

Brooklyn, a novelits´ neighbourhood

¨You could ascribe this shift to the rampant gentrification that has swept across much of Brooklyn, or at least the part of it that lies closest to Manhattan (a recent survey indicated that Brooklyn contained four of the nation's top 25 most rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods). The response to it has been conflicted. On the one hand no one wants to return to the 1980s, when a neighbourhood such as Red Hook, now home to Ikea, was dubbed by Life magazine the crack capital of America. On the other hand, rising rents and property prices change the character. If he were able to return, Agee would still find Syrians along Atlantic Avenue and Sicilian-speaking Italians in Carroll Gardens. The Polish atmosphere of Greenpoint persists, as do the descendants of the "grizzling skull-capped Jew" Agee encountered on DeKalb Avenue. But here's what else he would find: spiralling rents; waiting-list only restaurants specialising in complex pork dishes; immaculately rendered bars posing as prohibition-era watering holes; and scores of cafés crowded all day long with young men and women staring intently at their laptops while the expensive cappuccino makers hiss and sigh. Of course writers can and do live anywhere, but the fact that Brooklyn has become, in the words of the New York Observer, "a zone of infestation, not only of novelists but reporters, pundits, poets, and those often closeted scribblers who call themselves editors and agents", is a peculiarity it shares with no other major metropolitan area. When Martin Amis moved to Cobble Hill last year it was widely viewed by the press as an official imprimatur on Brooklyn's status as the writing factory of America. Not that Brooklyn was ever short of writers – Walt Whitman used to edit the Brooklyn Eagle, and Norman Mailer held court in Brooklyn Heights for much of his life, alongside Truman Capote – but the phenomenon is now so pronounced that you could say, without exaggeration, that there are two principal avenues for would-be writers in America. The first is to swallow the exorbitant price tag for one of the country's multiplying creative-writing courses (usually Masters of Fine Arts, or MFAs); the second is to move to Brooklyn.¨

REFERENCE:

Excerpt from the article by Aaron Hicklin

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2012/jul/08/why-brooklyn-is-mecca-for-writers