the Getty Museum, a “fortress” designed to resist flames

The Getty Center is the work of architect Richard Meier. Limestone rock, concrete and steel bars were used to construct the building, which cost around a billion dollars.

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. The museum is in an area affected by an evacuation order but its 125,000 pieces – including Rembrandts, Van Gogh and Monets – and some 1.4 million documents did not have to move.

“The staff, collections and buildings are safe”wrote the museum on “the threat is still there”. Built like “a beautiful fortress”le Getty a “was built to accommodate valuable items and protect them from fires, earthquakes, and beyond any reach”, explained its communications manager in 2019, when the establishment was already threatened by flames. “We are confident that the museum will not risk anything”said Lisa Lapin again.

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 rooms. rooms and damage collections.

And if flames ever break 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.