A Blueprint for Workers’ Pride

Their children grew up during the job. And some craftsmen began and finished lengthy apprenticeships there. But it was not just the unprecedented five, six or 10 years that made working on the new Getty Center different.

The money sure was good, with lots of overtime from a deep-pockets client during a construction depression in the rest of Southern California. Still, pay alone is not what the stonemasons, metalworkers, carpenters, painters, plumbers, antique restorers, schedulers and accountants will remember most about the $1-billion arts campus they have built atop a Brentwood hill.

The Getty’s complexity was often mind-boggling. Architect Richard Meier demanded Modernist precision down to an eighth of an inch from a daily work force of as many as 1,200. Yet the complicated logistics will not be the sole measure of success for general contractor Dinwiddie Construction Co., its more than 300 subcontracting firms on the project and the 1,000 or so suppliers.

All that was important. However, something less tangible, maybe even sentimental, is most mentioned now: the sense of having been part of an extraordinary construction experience. The men and women who are sprinting to finish the Getty Center for its Dec. 16 public opening say they feel connected to it in a way they never did to the shopping malls, office towers and even other museums they have worked on in the past. Even if the architecture puzzles them, the Getty Center’s move from drawing board to reality stretched their talents in unexpected ways, many say.

“To me it’s like the Eighth Wonder of the World and it makes me proud I was able to work on it. I’ve had some of my best years here,” said Charles Cunningham, 58, a metalwork supervisor from Northridge. An employee of Washington Iron Works of Gardena, he has helped install many of the Getty’s elegant white-steel stairways, among other fixtures, over the past six years.

Stonework foreman Robert Dooley, who works for DBM/Hatch Inc. of South El Monte, expressed similar feelings. He showed a visitor how the rough-cut blocks of Italian travertine on much of the Getty’s exterior were connected to metal panels with a clever system of dowels. About 325,000 stone pieces, some with fossil imprints of ancient leaves and feathers, were shipped from a quarry near Rome, through the Panama Canal, to Los Angeles for those walls and pavements.

“It’s been a lot of time away from the family. But as far as the pride of working on it, it’s something that I have never had so much before,” said Dooley, 37, who has been at the Getty since 1993, often logging 60-hour weeks plus commuting time from his Riverside home. “There will be nothing like this again, as long as I live anyways.”

For all involved, building the new Getty has been a long, sometimes squabbling, haul.

Work was made more difficult by the 1994 Northridge earthquake, delicate relations with nearby residential neighborhoods and, despite being freeway-adjacent, a rather inaccessible hilltop site. An extra challenge was to satisfy the aesthetic ambitions of the Richard Meier & Partners firm and the J. Paul Getty Trust, both of which sometimes seemed to expect posterity to judge them for the grain of a maple bookshelf or the brightness of an emergency exit sign.

“When we were awarded the project in 1987, we knew this was going to be a tremendous building effort and a world landmark. But I’m sure none of us may have appreciated the tremendous human effort required to deliver it,” said Greg Cosko, president of Dinwiddie Construction and the project executive.

Dinwiddie previously built the Getty’s Malibu villa, completed in 1974, and such mega-projects as the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco and the second California Plaza skyscraper on Bunker Hill. Yet the $800 million or so in Getty Center contracts that Dinwiddie handled was four times as much as its largest jobs in the past.

Getty Center subcontracts ranged from about $100 million to Harmon Ltd. of Minnesota for the metal and glass walls, skylights and canopies to $10,000 for coat check equipment from the Railex Corp. in New York. Sophisticated seismic systems were installed in gallery floors to protect sculptures, and computerized skylights have louvers that shift with the sun. About 250,000 sandbags were used for erosion control and more than 8,000 native oaks, jacarandas, citrus and other trees were planted. An electric tram, two-thirds of a mile long, was erected to transport visitors up the slope.

Most people might gulp to hear final cost estimates from Steven D. Rountree, the Getty Trust’s vice president and former director for operations and planning. “With all last-minute overtime and claims, we’re right at $1 billion, plus or minus $50 million,” Rountree said recently. Six years ago, a price tag of $360 million was mentioned.

Through the multiplier effect, the project has generated nearly $2 billion for the Southern California economy, according to Getty estimates.

In facing pressures of time and the growing budget, Dinwiddie was the proverbial man in the middle. During a recent interview in a construction trailer office on site next to the San Diego Freeway, Cosko recalled being “caught between the Getty Trust, which was feeling they were falling behind, and the Meier office, which felt we were going too fast. I’ve never gone so fast and fallen so behind at the same time.”

“One of the things I respect,” he added, “is that we were able to debate, able to have very aggressive arguments, and yet come back to the table the following day and continue working.”

Headquartered in San Francisco, Dinwiddie faced its own internal complications. Soon after it won the Getty contract, the firm was acquired by Fletcher Construction Co. of New Zealand. With Getty work going at a feverish pace, a group of Dinwiddie executives last year bought back the firm and merged it with E.A. Hathaway Co. of Santa Clara. Getty Trust and Meier firm officials said those corporate changes did not affect construction progress.

Curtis D. Williams, the Getty Trust’s director of construction and facilities, said Dinwiddie did “a superb job in taking the design and creating something that met the design intent and was yet something that was able to be built.”

Michael Palladino, the Meier firm’s design partner for the Getty, recalled that Dinwiddie had to proceed even before all detailed designs of the six-building campus were ready and with limits on work hours and truck traffic imposed by the city and neighbors. Palladino praised the construction crews for carrying out Meier’s complex details in ways that, he said, are intended to last “not just one lifetime, but many.”

Meier’s severe geometry, often based on a grid of squares of 2 feet and 6 inches, presented difficulties. Tiny spaces between sidewalk pavers had to align with those between wall stones, which align with turns in metal stairway rails, which align with window edges, and on and on. Workmen recall moving columns, pipings and stones for errors of less than a quarter of an inch.

Subcontractors described such obsession with detail as painful but worth the challenge. “It’s overall quite an opportunity to showcase your work and anyone else’s work,” said Luke Walsh, project manager for Washington Iron Works. “I’d rather have 10 of these jobs than 50 of others where they don’t care about the quality of the work.”

Special attention was paid to how museum interiors would display the art collection. Numerous models and tests were made of wall and floor colors, materials, forms and lighting. Even after full construction, some details were rejected by the Getty, Meier or Thierry Despont, the designer who worked on the decorative arts galleries. For example, a brown silk fabric with a floral pattern was taken off the walls of a room for 18th century French furnishings and replaced recently with a less busy, pale green material. The cost was about $20,000, a Getty official estimated.

After several years of planning, work began in November 1989 on the 1,200-car garage at the hill’s base and in mid-1992 on the 1 million square feet of buildings at the top. In addition to the museum, the Getty Center has buildings for the trust’s administrative offices, a grant program and institutes for art education, research and conservation.

Builders say they were lucky to have been behind schedule when the January 1994 earthquake proved the inadequacy of then-current techniques of steel frame welding. By then, steel was up on only two Getty buildings and no walls were finished. Steel connections were redone and improved methods were used on the rest of the complex. All that delayed work six months and cost more than $50 million, according to the Getty.

In terms of overall duration, almost everybody speaks of a new career record. The Getty’s Rountree measures it by one of his daughters: she was in kindergarten when he got involved and she is now a university freshman.

“Oh Lord, I feel like I’ve had this contract since I’ve been born,” said Raymond Brochstein, president of Brochsteins Inc. His Houston-based fine woodworking firm has produced a large portion of Getty gallery finishes and administration work stations since 1993. Meier’s designs required horizontal wood grain in cabinetry and furniture, an unusual and time-consuming method. Those kinds of details, plus the immense scale of the Getty project, made it “a difficult, demanding job but a very satisfying one too,” he said.

During the recession, Getty work was a life preserver, helping many professionals and workers float with overtime pay into the improved economy now. Unemployment in the construction industry in the early ‘90s allowed Getty and Dinwiddie to hire and keep a large roster of talented people.

“I think the job was a blessing for a lot of people. It kept them working while things were kind of slow and it helped a lot of people get through hard times. They didn’t feel it when other people did,” said DBM/Hatch stonework labor foreman Jack Meyers, a Fullerton resident.

A small sampling of Getty construction spending in Southern California included: seating upholstery work and fine fabric wall hangings installed in some galleries by the Classic Design firm of Culver City; storm drains, decorative waterfalls and bathrooms by Murray Co., a mechanical and plumbing subcontractor in Rancho Dominguez; rental of trailers and warehouses; hotel rooms and apartments for out-of-town workers; office supplies; and food and coffee for a daily work force that averaged 750 on the hill.

If a month went by without a work-halting accident, Dinwiddie brought In-N-Out Burgers trucks to the site and paid for lunch. So far, about 13,000 burgers have been served on the hill.

(The project’s safety record is good for “that kind of large-scale site, the number of people involved and the duration of the project,” said Dan Shipley, regional director for the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health. The most serious injuries involved falls from scaffolding and severe cuts from construction equipment, he said.)

The network of spending was national and international: maple from Michigan forests, museum display cabinets from Baltimore and Germany, wall fabrics and a special crew of gilders from Paris. And all that Italian stone.

Pierre Finkelstein, a New York-based artist, painted about 40 different faux marble patterns on gallery woodwork and sculpture stands. (The signature “Pierre” is hidden in various spots throughout the museum.) For their $300,000 contract, he and his assistants from Grand Illusion Decorative Painting Inc. often did the painstaking work seated on roller platforms a few inches above the floor over a period of five months. Recently, they darkened a modern white marble pedestal for a 1st century Roman statue of Zeus in the museum’s entry atrium.

Finkelstein flew back and forth from New York about 10 times and rented Sunset Strip efficiency apartments. He bought special brushes and paints from France. Other paints, tape, paper and buckets came from a Yorba Linda shop; linseed oil came from a Westwood business and scaffolds were purchased locally too.

At times, Finkelstein and other subcontractors said, the Getty was a tough place to work as various trades competed for time and space amid mud and dust. But all that was worth the effort, said Finkelstein, who more often paints in private homes. “One of the most rewarding things at the Getty,” he said, “is that our work gets to be seen by millions of people.”