Fire could have destroyed the Getty’s irreplaceable art. Should the museum move?

On the morning of Jan. 7, I was writing at my desk and just into paragraph 4 of a museum exhibition review when my phone pinged. Wildfire had broken out high in the Pacific Palisades hills, and widespread evacuations were possible.

Before I had gotten to paragraph 10, another alert demanded: Leave now.

I was far from the danger zone, but the review I was writing was for an ancient Thracian art exhibition at the Getty Villa. I checked the online evacuation map. The Villa was squarely within its boundaries. Soon the museum was surrounded by flames and, as days went by, epic destruction unfolded for miles around.

What has been dubbed a pair of “fire hurricanes,” virtually unprecedented blazes fueled by steady winds of 70 mph with gusts over 100 mph, swept through great swaths of Los Angeles County, west and east. Over three punishing weeks, nearly 38,000 acres of homes, businesses and cultural landmarks would be destroyed, racking up more than $250 billion in losses. More than two dozen people were killed.

The queasiness in the pit of my stomach was greater than the one I felt in 2019, when rapidly spreading fire raged west of the 405 Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass, just north of the Getty Center — the beachside Villa’s inland mothership. That disaster, since ominously named the Getty Fire, broke out at Getty Center Drive and raced up the hills above the museum’s parking structure and its adjacent sculpture garden. Last month, as day turned to night and night to morning, the magnitude of devastation in Pacific Palisades came into stomach-churning focus — soon to be coupled with the nearly unfathomable horror of epic ruin nearly 40 miles east in Altadena.

Urban fire — explosive structure-to-structure conflagrations, rather than ordinary ignition of wildland vegetation — had arrived at astounding scale. Fueled nationally by lackadaisical efforts to halt escalating climate destruction, and driven locally by gale-force Santa Ana winds, the menace lingers. And grows. It will not be disappearing from the civic life of L.A. anytime soon.

In the fires’ aftermath, an unexpected but fittingly inconceivable thought came to mind. I found myself wondering: Should the Getty move? Should the Villa, and the Getty Center in the fire-prone Brentwood hills nearby, both evacuate — for good?

Where they might safely go was hard to imagine, given the wide-ranging history of L.A. fires. Maybe L.A. County’s Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration site? The huge downtown building, scheduled to begin emptying out this summer, is the focus of a fierce preservation battle. Is such adaptive reuse just wishful thinking in the midst of crisis?

To be clear, neither the Getty Villa nor the Getty Center burned. No ancient Roman statues crumbled, no masterpieces of Old Master European painting or modern photographs turned to ash. Aerial water drops and torrents from fire hoses did not make mush out of books and manuscripts. The thick sludge of fallen cinders that transformed into a solid black mirror the limpid blue reflecting pool in the Villa’s interior formal garden can be dredged out. The infrastructure of both museum complexes, one opened in 1974 and the other in 1997, was built and subsequently renovated in ways to minimize a critical threat that has always been known.

These are fire-hardened buildings. Both were originally constructed with grave hazard in mind. Smart upgrades have been made over passing decades, and forthcoming deferred maintenance plans for the Getty Center, likely to cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars, will surely take into account recent events.

The Getty Villa pool, usually clear, is filled with ash from the Palisades fire, which burned around the art museum

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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Also, staff at all levels have extensive response training. Without it, the Villa might have been lost. (Flames came within feet of the building, and 17 courageous staff members who remained onsite went through 40 handheld fire extinguishers stamping them out.) The Getty Trust takes emergency preparedness very seriously, as edifying reports published on its website explain in considerable detail.

The question now, though, has shifted. The question now is whether readiness is enough. It is certainly extreme to think of walking away from two existing museum complexes. But so is what happened in January.

Fires will come again, and today “fire hurricane” has entered the lexicon. Words like “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” accompanied dazed descriptions of a regional fire season that has been otherwise routine for centuries. The Palisades Fire took 20 days to reach 95% containment, compared with nine for the 2019 Getty Fire. This year, the Getty Center closed for three weeks, while the Getty Villa remains closed indefinitely.

If the two museums were to move — and merge their collections in the process, connecting the Villa’s European antiquities with the Center’s European medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and early Modern art — where would they go? High-profile art museums are absent from East Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. A cultural gap could be filled at a safer site.

County officials are vacating downtown’s Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Or maybe downtown L.A.? The county’s soon-to-be-vacated Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration is a monumental, late Moderne civic building whose 1960 team of architects included the trailblazing Paul Revere Williams, the first African American member (and later, fellow) of the American Institute of Architects. Is adaptive reuse of the Hahn building for an art museum’s needs even possible? I don’t know the answer, but the Civic Center location is sure ideal.

At 980,000 square feet, the Hahn hall is slightly larger than the Getty Center. With a south fa?ade facing Grand Park, it rises across the street from the Music Center, a block from Walt Disney Concert Hall and REDCAT, and two blocks from the Broad, the Colburn School for performing arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Two blocks in the other direction, the L.A. Unifed School District’s Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts hosts nearly 1,200 kids.

A move would have a significant impact on museum staff. Employees often live within as easy a commute to work as possible, so a shift 20 miles east matters. Downtown, though, is the region’s mass transit hub. It connects across L.A. in ways Brentwood and Pacific Palisades don’t. That would help staff — and visitors too.

What would become of those perpetually threatened Getty facilities? They wouldn’t just be abandoned. How about a scholarly antiquities research facility, upstairs in a Villa refurbished downstairs to replicate the lavish interiors of a seaside Roman house in ancient Herculaneum, utilizing reproductions? (Replica statues have always populated the interior formal gardens.) Maybe a residential think-tank in Brentwood, like the one envisioned by billionaire philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen for a nearby ridge?

Perhaps a school? (The late critic Dave Hickey used to jokingly describe the Getty Center, with its austere but lavish architecture, as Cal State Paradise.) Or something else?

Whatever the case, a building’s general use is this issue’s centerpiece. The Getty collection numbers 44,000 objects. When disaster approaches, people can be evacuated, but rooms and vaults filled with irreplaceable works of art cannot. They’re stuck. Getting humans out isn’t easy, but getting the art out is virtually impossible.

The Getty says the museum is the safest place possible to be during a fire, and I for one believe it. If I were stuck in Pacific Palisades or the Brentwood hills when a fire hurricane was spreading terror and destruction at 70 mph, that’s where I would want to be. Fire-resistant stone, concrete, protected steel and well-irrigated landscaping would surely be beneficial.

More beneficial, however, is not being stuck there at all.

The 2019 Getty Fire burns west of the 405 Freeway as seen from the southbound side of the freeway before Getty Center Drive.

(Los Angeles Times)

Needless to say, any such move would be expensive. The Getty, unlike most art museums, could surely handle it. The endowment of the umbrella Getty Trust stands at $9.1 billion. A big expenditure would inevitably impact other institutional programs, at least in the short term. Collection preservation, however, is every art museum’s highest priority. That’s non-negotiable.

A definitive answer to the question of whether the Getty collections should move isn’t yet possible. Lots more study and serious discussion are needed. It would take time and energy — and abundant creativity, an art institution specialty. But answering the question of whether the conversation should begin is pretty clear. Fire season will be back in no time.

And then back again and again, as it has been since time immemorial, only bigger. An answer awaits.