A lift for LA as iconic Getty Villa Museum reopens, scarred but intact after fires
In the gardens of Getty Villa Friday morning, a light breeze and the touch of fountains punctuate peaceful calm; There is no suspicion of construction below on the road to the Pacific coast. Almost six months after palisades forest fires burned 23,000 surrounding hectares, decimated by thousands of neighboring houses and damaged a large part of the museum, the Los Angeles monument is once again open.
It is a moment of joy for staff and visitors, tempered by recovery continues outside the museum walls. Alexandria Sivak, deputy director of communications for the Getty, expresses “a solemn understanding that we are surrounded by many houses that have failed to cross the fire … while feeling very grateful to stand.”
Visitors to the reopening of the museum echo this gratitude.
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The Getty Villa Museum, a cultural touchstone in Los Angeles, has escaped significant damage to forest fires. His reopening gives Angelenos in recovery, and others, something to smile.
“To come here and discover, it shows that there is life and that there is beauty and there is still art to live here,” explains Phil Sky, who worked on the villa as a carpenter about 20 years ago.
The oil magnate J. Paul Getty built the Roman style villa over 50 years ago as a monument to classic art and architecture. It houses tens of thousands of Greek, Roman and Etruscan antiques. The gardens offer beauty and tranquility overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The olive trees, fennel and purple artichokes grow in a garden of herbs filled with Mediterranean plants. At the corner of the street, the rooms of the outdoor garden rooms surround a sparkling reflective pool described with perfectly cut hedges, and closed by frescoes of the Italian countryside.
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“I don’t feel like it’s there,” says Sky. “I walk in Europe or another country as I go here.”
During the fire of the palisades, the illustrations were safe inside the buildings, which were designed to resist heat and flames. But “there was stress and nervousness in the operating center while we were looking at fires starting around the campus,” said Sivak. The fire consumed more than 1,400 trees on the property and left the soot and the ashes that cover the site.
This is Robyn Kranzler’s first visit to the museum, even if she grew up in North Hollywood, nearby. “I am stunned. I didn’t know it was so beautiful here, ”she says.
The professional runner lives in the Wisconsin now and has not been back for almost four years. The extent of the damage caused by the fire in the region is shocking, she says, and the villa provides a significant break in the political and social upheavals in the world. “It is so easy to get caught in everything here and now. … And having something like that reminds you that there is much more.”
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Lee Holtz lives in New York, but spends a lot of time in Los Angeles. He was here during the January fires. In a “impermanence landscape”, the museum is remarkable for sustainable, he said. “It is the survivor of a previous civilization and in some ways. It is therefore symbolic in all kinds of ways. ”
The idea that he might not survive the next disaster has made Heather Fuller head to Orange County, south of Los Angeles. She planned to visit in January, but the fires moved her away.
She is happy that the villa is open, she says, and hopes: “It symbolizes that all those who are affected can also return to their lives.”
