The Getty Center grounds connect two sharply different architectural legacies in Bernadette Fox’s career: the museum project that exposed her to the waste of prestige construction, and the later public effort to revive the principles embodied in her lost Twenty Mile House. At the Getty Center grounds, Fox helped oversee imported travertine; she also proposed giving rejected stone a new purpose. The proposal was refused, but the encounter helped clarify a design ethic that would outlast the house itself.

Fox’s work at the Getty Center grounds

When the Team Disney project was repeatedly delayed by permits, Fox presented a flowchart for navigating the building department. Michael Graves sent her to Los Angeles to work on site. After the Team Disney job ended six months later, Graves offered her a position back in New York, but Fox preferred the greater freedom she found in Los Angeles. On his recommendation, she joined Richard Meier and Partners, which was already working on the Getty Center grounds.

Fox was one of about half a dozen young architects tasked with sourcing, importing, and quality-checking the sixteen thousand tons of travertine that would sheath the museum. The scale of the work made the stone’s journey central to her experience: material was shipped from Italy in enormous quantities, then some of it was rejected by her superiors over minor inconsistencies. The museum’s demands for a consistent finish thus placed Fox in direct contact with a system in which vast resources could be expended and usable material discarded.

The rejected-travertine proposal

Fox grew indignant at the waste. After Paul Jellinek told her that the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs had acquired a vacant lot beside Watts Towers and was interviewing architects for a visitors center, she spent a month secretly developing a proposal. It joined a fountain and museum to a series of viewing platforms, all made from travertine rejected by the Getty Center grounds project.

The design connected the proposed new work to its setting. Jellinek recalled that Fox recognized a kinship between her scheme and Watts Towers, which had been constructed from other people’s discarded materials. Her viewing platforms took nautilus forms, echoing both fossils visible in the travertine and the whorls of the towers. The material was therefore more than surplus stock: its fossils and its prior rejection became part of the proposal’s visual logic.

When Fox presented the plan to Getty management, it was quickly rejected. The institution’s priority was completing the Getty Center grounds project, not redirecting its excess material to another public project. Jellinek also identified the public-relations problem: giving rejected stone to a South Central project could imply that material considered unsuitable for the Getty was acceptable elsewhere. The refusal revealed a conflict between Fox’s interest in reuse and an institution concerned with its own construction goals and the meaning attached to its standards.

An ethic, and an incomplete archive

The drawings for Fox’s proposal could not be found in the Richard Meier and Partners archives. Jellinek thought Fox had probably thrown them away; that explanation is his supposition, not a documented account of what happened to the plans. Their absence matters because the proposal survives chiefly through recollection: its month of secret work, its proposed reuse of the stone, and the forms that joined fossils to Watts Towers are described, but the drawings themselves are missing.

For Jellinek, the proposal’s lasting importance was not whether it was built. He saw it as the moment Fox formed a distinct point of view: waste nothing. The ethic also helps explain the contrast between her Getty work and her own architecture. At the museum, the quantity of imported stone and the rejection of pieces for slight inconsistencies made waste visible; in her independent projects, reuse offered a way to treat available materials as the beginning of design rather than as refuse. The Getty Center grounds thus mark both a workplace and a formative point of disagreement over what materials, and whose judgment of them, should count.

A later public afterlife

The Getty Center grounds reappear in the story of the Twenty Mile House through a competition announced for the house’s twentieth anniversary. By then the house no longer stood, photographs were scarce, and Fox was said to have destroyed the plans. The Green Builders of America and the Turner Foundation invited architects, students, and builders to propose a new version of the house and use the exercise to consider what building green might mean over the following twenty years.

The brief specified a three-bedroom, 4,200-square-foot residence at 6528 Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. Its defining restriction came from Fox’s own rule: every building material had to be sourced within twenty miles of the site. The winning design was to be announced at a GBA/AIA gala at the Getty Center grounds, with a $40,000 prize. The announcement does not establish that the house was rebuilt or identify a winner; it shows instead how the vanished building continued to generate design work and public discussion.

That afterlife is sharpened by the house’s physical disappearance. It had taken three years to complete, yet bulldozers demolished it in a day. The only surviving photographs identified in the account were those taken by realtor Judy Toll, and the only plans were the comically incomplete set Fox had submitted to the building department. Against that fragile record, the competition made reconstruction an argument about memory as well as materials: the original could not simply be recovered from a complete archive, but its twenty-mile constraint could be carried forward. The Getty Center grounds, once linked to stone rejected during a major museum project, became the announced venue for a renewed conversation about Fox’s architecture and its ecological principles.