Under threat from the fire that destroyed the Pacific Palisades area, the famous Getty Museum overlooking Los Angeles was designed to protect its priceless art collections from the flames.
• Also read: [IMAGES] Fires continue to spread in Los Angeles
• Also read: Los Angeles fires: devastated citizens
• Also read: Los Angeles fires: questions and criticism around fire-fighting infrastructure
The museum is in an area affected by an evacuation order, but its 125,000 pieces – including paintings by Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Monet – and some 1.4 million documents did not have to be moved .
“Staff, collections and buildings are safe,” the museum wrote in X. However, “the threat is still there.”
Built like “a beautiful fortress”, the Getty was “built to accommodate valuable pieces and protect them from fires, earthquakes, beyond any reach”, explained its communications manager in 2019, while the establishment was already threatened by flames.
“We are confident that the museum will not risk anything,” said Lisa Lapin.
First barrier against fire: the building is covered with some 300,000 blocks of travertine, a limestone rock that resists flames.
Its structure is also made of concrete and steel bars, unlike most Californian buildings – buildings included – whose walls are often simple wooden panels fixed on pillars.
Finally, its roofs are covered with crushed stone to prevent embers carried by the wind from creating a hearth there.
In its gardens, where fire-resistant succulents and cacti have been favored, a tight network of pipes runs through the basement, connected to a water tank of nearly four million liters.
Activating sprinklers to moisten the ground, as was the case in 2019, can help prevent embers from settling there.
Inside the museum, the ventilation system can also be switched to a closed circuit – on the same principle as the ventilation of a car to recycle the air in the passenger compartment – which prevents smoke from entering the room. rooms and damage collections.
And if ever flames broke out between its walls, its galleries could be separated from each other and sealed by a system of double doors, similar to the watertight compartments of a submarine.
The Getty Center, which also houses a research center and a foundation, a thousand employees in total, was built between 1984 and 1997 by architect Richard Meier, at an estimated cost of around a billion dollars.
