A Grand New Getty

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American architecture has spent the past few years in the dumps, fretful and feckless. Aesthetically, there is neither invigorating ferment nor much consensus, and the collapse of both the housing and commercial real estate markets means that even big-name architects have precious little to do right now. So when Richard Meier's final designs for the J. Paul Getty Trust's vast art center, a $360 million, six-building museum-and-art-scholarship wonderland, were unveiled in Los Angeles last week, it wasn't just his envious peers who paid attention. Meier won the commission over 32 fellow architectural stars (including Charles Moore, Frank Gehry and Robert Venturi) back in 1984, and given the prominence of the project and the deep-pocket client, every year the architect spent tweaking his design only raised the stakes higher. "Architecture," said Meier on the eve of the debut of the most important work of his career, "takes a long time."

The Getty Center has been called the commission of the century, and for once that may not be hyperbole. The project includes a sprawling museum containing everything from an 18th century French corner cupboard made for the head of the Polish army to Van Gogh's Irises; a spacious, circular loft building, where art scholars can think and write, mingle and argue; a separate building devoted to harnessing computers on behalf of art-historical truth; an auditorium; a restaurant; and a huge state-of-the-art facility for conservators. All this will be set amid gardens and fountains on a positively Olympian site -- 110 acres abutting the Brentwood neighborhood, on a hill just half a mile north of Sunset Boulevard -- with panoramas to die for. "You can see downtown, you can see UCLA, Century City, Santa Monica and the ocean," says Meier, who has lived half the time in a house on the site since 1986.

The project's scale, ambition and high-mindedness -- portentousness even -- are a throwback to a time when the cultural mission was clear, thinking was big, and budgets were gigantic. But then Meier, 57, is rather gloriously anachronistic -- and high-minded and portentous -- himself. While most of his peers have spent the past two decades feverishly inventing (or capitulating to) a sometimes gimcrack neo-neoclassicism, Meier has remained an unrepentant circa-1927 Corbusian -- modernism's last best heir. "I don't think you change your values every day or every time you do a new building," he says. "If you are worried about style or what is the trend of the moment, you are in trouble."

Meier's architecture is cool and impeccable, deluxe abstract collages of interlocking white-metal-clad boxes and curved white-metal-clad walls, with nothing but dark punched windows and steel stair rails for exterior ornament. It is architecture for the 21st century as imagined in the early 20th century. There are no diversionary pediments and keystones, only suave geometries and rigorous details. His best-known work has been relatively small-scale zillionaires' villas and a few museums.