New Is Old Again At Getty Villa

"I think early on Machado & Silvetti had the notion to use the metaphor of an archeological dig as a way in which they would organize the site, to treat the Villa as a restored object in an archeological dig and to construct the new elements around the museum building in a way that would reinforce that metaphor."

"The circulation on the site was really quite different originally. The entry was going to be from the northeast side of the museum but it migrated to the south side. In the details things change, but there was a pretty consistent sense of wanting to create a kind of visitor experience where there was a procession from arrival to the museum and a kind of unfolding of the site in a way that really revealed the building as an object in the landscape. When you came to visit before you never were able to get outside the building. You never had any sense of being any place but inside the building or right up against it. You had no sense of it in the landscape and I think from very early on that one of the really important things for Machado & Silvetti was to make it something that you could see from afar and place it in the landscape."

"One of the critical elements for organizing a visitor’s experience of the site, which is explained in some of the written literature and the short orientation film in the museum, is the concept of having this building as a restored object in an archeological dig. The minute that one points out to a visitor a couple of the visual cues, they have that sense of being in a place that is carved out of the earth. A lot of the new construction material – all of the new buildings are made of concrete, exposed aggregate, wood, stone, glass – are intended to indicate geological layering."