The American Society of Landscape Architects, which just concluded its annual conference here in Los Angeles, has rewarded the Getty Center and its landscape architecture firm, OLIN, its annual Landmark Award, given to works of landscape architecture 15 to 50 odd years old.
If you haven’t been to visit the Getty Center in a while, even years, make the trip. It is not only one of Los Angeles’s great cultural institutions; it now has taken its place as one of the most distinctive and beautiful garden settings in the world.
Plus — you must see how the trees have grown in. Trees can disappear in the mind’s eye as green generalities . . . until a particular tree dies or a limb crashes down to crunch your Prius — but the maturing urban forest of the Getty Center is breathtaking, and it deserves your close scrutiny and resulting refreshment.
As a Chinese Zen Buddhist patriarch of the sixth centuryadmonished: “The purpose of life is to see” — so when new information opens the eyes, aren’t we grateful?
“Well, I am grateful for knowing about the 30-inch-square ground-plate grid Richard Meier set into place to organize the hundred plus acres of the Getty Center into a unified whole. OLIN landscape architects seized on the idea and subsequently developed multiples of the module (affectionately dubbed the ‘Meier grid’) as a basis for defining the landscape elements, as well as the location, spacing, and shaping of major trees throughout the campus,” Comras writes.
It may be human nature to undervalue or to take for granted what is in one’s own backyard. The rich, beautiful, refreshing and spreading canopy of the Getty Center’s urban forest awaits your reassessment.