Getty at 10: Still aloof, yet totally L.A.

During much of the 1990s, as the Getty Center was rising on its Brentwood hilltop, a couple of stubborn questions dogged the hugely ambitious project: Would Richard Meier's design ever have anything meaningful to do with, or say about, the city over which it loomed? Or would it exist as an expensive import, a vast collection of smooth enamel and rough travertine conjured up by a New York architect who looked west for commissions but east, to Europe and its Modernist past, for inspiration?

This weekend, as the $1.2-billion complex celebrates its 10th anniversary, those questions seem as relevant as ever.

In part that's because the answers keep changing. When Meier's design proposal was unveiled, the Getty was widely seen as an anomaly in Los Angeles, an effort to lend instant, old-fashioned respectability to an institution that craved it. Then, after it opened Dec. 16, 1997, the Getty surprised us by fitting in. And in the last couple of years it has begun to look like an anomaly all over again, though for a fresh set of reasons.

Looking back at the museum's changing reputation offers more than the chance to see how the relationships between a city and its most significant landmarks change over time. It also helps explain the various shifts -- many of them profound -- that have redefined the field of architecture, and the city of Los Angeles, over the last 10 years.

Architecture's leading figures have become global brand names, courted by commercial, governmental and cultural clients alike. L.A., for its part, has grown more vertical and noticeably denser -- and less white by the day. It takes most of its external cultural cues these days not from Europe or New York but from Latin America and Asia.

That's not to say we have given up entirely on the idea that some Old World glamour can save or redeem us. The biggest local museum commission since the Getty, the expansion and reconfiguration of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, went to Renzo Piano, 70, a talented and genteel architect who splits his time between Paris and Genoa, Italy. But the next music director of the L.A. Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, is a 26-year-old from Venezuela. The new dean of the architecture department at USC is Qingyun Ma, a Shanghai architect who just turned 42. His counterpart at UCLA, 45-year-old Hitoshi Abe, arrived here in April from Sendai, Japan.