Getty Center

A white tram slides up the hillside without a driver, quiet as breath. Below, the 405 freeway shrinks to a ribbon of glitter. Ahead, on the ridge, a city of pale stone and white metal waits in the sun. This is the Getty Center, an art museum that begins working on you before you have seen a single painting.

The tram ride is not decoration; it is the front door. The planners wanted arrival to feel like leaving the city behind, so cars stay at the bottom of the hill and the electric tram carries everyone up the last three-quarters of a mile. Children ride at the front windows. By the time the doors open at the top, the freeway noise is gone.

The money behind it came from oil. J. Paul Getty, once called the richest private citizen in the world, collected art for decades and left his fortune to a trust devoted to the visual arts. When he died in 1976, the trust received billions, and it had to spend a share of that endowment every year. The result, two decades later, was this hilltop campus.

Architect Richard Meier won the commission in 1984 and spent thirteen years building it. The Getty Center opened in December 1997, and its reported cost was around 1.3 billion dollars, which made it one of the most expensive art institutions ever constructed.

The stone is the first thing your hands will want to touch. Meier clad the buildings in travertine quarried near Tivoli, outside Rome, the same region that supplied stone for ancient Roman building projects. Instead of polishing it, the builders split the stone along its natural grain, leaving rough faces full of texture. Look closely and you can find fossils in the surfaces: leaves and branches pressed into the rock long before human history.

Meier arranged the campus on a strict geometric grid, then let the buildings bend along the ridgelines. White enameled panels, glass, and that honey-colored stone repeat everywhere, so the whole hilltop feels like one continuous thought. Some visitors call it a modern acropolis.

The museum fills a series of pavilions joined by courtyards, bridges, and fountains. The collection concentrates on European art from before the twentieth century: illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance drawings, French furniture that once stood in royal houses, and painting after painting lit by daylight from computer-controlled skylights.

The most visited canvas is Vincent van Gogh's Irises. He painted it in 1889 in the garden of the asylum at Saint-Remy, in his first weeks there, steadying himself through close observation. The Getty bought it in 1990. The blue-purple flowers crowd the frame, each one drawn distinct, like faces in a crowd.

Below the museum, the Central Garden spills down the hillside. Artist Robert Irwin designed it, and he insisted it was not landscaping but a single artwork made of plants, water, and steel. A stream zigzags down through a corridor of trees, ends in a waterfall, and feeds a round pool where a maze of azaleas appears to float. Irwin's motto for the garden is set into the plaza: always changing, never twice the same.

Then there is the view. From the south promontory, past a garden of cactus planted where no visitor can walk, Los Angeles unrolls from the mountains to downtown's towers to the flat blue line of the Pacific. On clear winter days you can take in snow, skyscrapers, and ocean in a single slow turn of the head.

Admission is free every day the museum opens. The trust's endowment pays the bills, so the only ticket you buy is for parking. The Getty also runs a research institute and a conservation institute on this campus, quiet buildings where scholars restore artworks and study how to keep the world's art alive.

Give the place at least half a day. Take the garden slowly. Eat outside if the weather allows, because the courtyards are half the architecture. And ride the tram down at closing time, when the stone turns amber and the city lights start to prick through the dusk.

Getty himself never stood here; he died two decades before the center opened. What stands on this ridge is not a monument to one man's taste so much as a bet: that if you put art, stone, water, and light on a hill and charge nothing, people will climb it. Every day, by the thousand, they do.