Getty Center

The Getty Center enters the account both as a major construction project and as the institution whose priorities expose a fault line in Bernadette Fox’s architectural practice. While Fox helped source stone for the museum, she grew troubled by travertine rejected for minor inconsistencies; she then proposed putting that material to use in a separate public project. The proposal was dismissed, leaving the Getty associated not only with architectural ambition but also with the limits the institution placed on her idea of responsible building.

Construction and Fox’s Work

After the Team Disney project ended, Michael Graves recommended Fox for a position with Richard Meier and Partners, whose firm was already working on the Getty Center. There, Fox joined a small group of young architects charged with sourcing, importing, and quality-checking the sixteen thousand tons of travertine that would sheath the museum. The scale of the task made material procurement a central part of her work: stone had to travel from Italy, be assessed, and meet the project’s standards before it could become part of the building.

That work also gave Fox a close view of what happened to material that fell short. In a retrospective account, she is described as growing indignant when ton after ton of imported travertine was refused by her superiors over minor inconsistencies. The rejected stone was not merely an abstract problem of construction efficiency. It became the material basis of an alternative she imagined: instead of treating imperfect pieces as unusable, she would make them the starting point for another architectural undertaking.

The Reuse Proposal

Fox spent a month secretly designing a fountain, a museum, and a series of viewing platforms from the Getty’s rejected travertine. The proposal connected the unused stone to a nearby cultural landmark: the Watts Towers, built from discarded materials. Her viewing platforms were shaped like nautilus shells, linking the fossils visible in the travertine with the whorled forms of the towers. In this design, material otherwise defined by its failure to satisfy the Getty’s specifications could carry a different kind of value—one grounded in reuse and in a formal relationship between the stone and its surroundings.

The proposal thus grew directly out of the work Fox was already doing for the Getty Center, but it redirected that work’s leftovers toward a new civic use. The contrast is pointed: the museum required vast quantities of carefully selected stone, while Fox envisioned a second project made from what that process cast aside. Her idea did not reject the material itself; it challenged the narrow boundary between acceptable and rejected material, and asked whether the latter could support a meaningful public design.

Rejection and the Missing Drawings

When Fox presented her plan to Getty management, they quickly rejected it. Paul Jellinek’s account describes the institution as focused on getting the Getty built, with little appetite for a junior employee’s proposal about what to do with surplus stone. He also identifies a public-relations concern: material judged inadequate for the Getty might be seen as inadequate for a project serving South Central. That explanation is Jellinek’s interpretation of the decision, but it places the refusal within a conflict over both institutional priorities and the meaning attached to reused materials.

The proposal’s material outcome was accompanied by an archival absence. Richard Meier and Partners could not find Fox’s drawings in the firm’s Getty Center archives. The account does not establish what became of them; it records only that they were not located there. Their absence contrasts with the detailed recollection of the scheme—its fountain, museum, platforms, rejected stone, and relationship to the Watts Towers—and leaves the project more fully present in testimony than in the surviving architectural record described here.

The Getty’s Afterlife in the Narrative

The Getty Center remains relevant beyond Fox’s employment there. A later competition marking the twentieth anniversary of her Twenty Mile House invited architects, students, and builders to reenvision that demolished residence and consider what it meant to build green in the following twenty years. The announcement connected the competition to the Green Builders of America and the Turner Foundation, with the winning design to be recognized at a gala at the Getty Center. The site that had once framed Fox’s encounter with rejected building material thus also became a venue for a later public conversation about her architectural legacy.

That recurrence gives the Getty a double significance in the book’s architectural record. It is the place where Fox participated in a monumental building effort and where the disposal of imperfect stone prompted her to imagine an alternative; it is also a later setting for honoring the house that made her reputation. The institution does not simply stand for construction on a grand scale. Through Fox’s unrealized reuse proposal, the missing drawings, and the subsequent competition, it becomes a measure of the distance between a building project’s official priorities and the less conventional possibilities its materials might have supported.