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The Getty Trust seems determined to create an architectural landmark in the hills of West Los Angeles, having spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars selecting an architect and earmarking at least $100 million for construction.
We wish it well and hope that architect Richard Meier will rise to the occasion, as we are sure he will to the budget, and create something beyond his usually predictable pristine, well-composed but ultimately unsympathetic structures.
With an endowment of an estimated $2.3 billion, making it the richest institution of its kind in the world, the trust envisions a complex in large part dedicated to the conservation of art and to art education. It is a noble cause.
Meanwhile, as the Getty goes about planning for the complex and gathering in art, three of the world's masterpieces are under siege right here in Southern California. It is a situation that begs the involvement of the trust, if not for the conservation of the art, then simply as a politic gesture to its host community.
The internationally acclaimed art pieces are the Ennis-Brown House in Los Feliz designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Blacker house in Pasadena and the Pratt House in Ojai, both designed by Charles and Henry Greene.
It is not that any one person, corporation, community or agency is acting out of maliciousness,...