Strategy and architecture helped the storied Getty Museum prepare for the Los Angeles wildfire | Canada Voices

As flames whip the Pacific Palisades, the storied Getty Villa museum has withstood the Los Angeles wildfires, preserving its 44,000-plus items thanks to strategy and architecture designed for today’s hotter world.

Both the Villa and the larger Getty Center in Brentwood have now successfully warded off encroaching fires, the latter in 2017, as decades of preparation by the J. Paul Getty Trust came into play. At the Villa last week, staff immediately sealed off the museum to keep out smoke and particulates, even as the grounds had been largely cleared of flammable overgrowth. Double walls protect the Villa, and a moat of Italian stone guards the Getty Center.

“It really is a fortress,” Getty Trust CEO Katherine Fleming said in an interview Tuesday. “We would never remove the collection. Think about how hard it is to move house – the worst possible thing we could try to do would be to take priceless works off the wall. Where are you going to try and take them?”

The Getty’s collections run from ancient to contemporary and include works such as Vincent van Gogh’s Irises and Rembrandt’s Young Man Leaning on a Stick, as well as a wide range of photographs and sculptures.

At least 24 people have died and 12,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed in the fires that began last week in Los Angeles, a global epicentre of culture.

Numerous major events have been postponed, including the Oscar nomination announcements, and Canadian pop superstar the Weeknd cancelled a major concert at the Rose Bowl and delayed the release of his new album, Hurry Up Tomorrow.

Belmont Music Publishers, dedicated to preserving and promoting the works of Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg, was destroyed by the Palisades fire, with some original scores and manuscripts lost in the blaze.

Many celebrities and artists have lost their homes, including the Pacific Palisades’s honourary mayor, Eugene Levy. The home of trumpeter and Edmonton native Jens Lindemann also burned down in the Palisades fire, taking a lifetime’s worth of instruments with it.

“I grabbed eight of my 35 trumpets, a jacket that happened to have my Order of Canada pin on it, and our passports,” Lindemann, a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told The Globe and Mail. The most prized of the saved trumpets was given to him by bandleader Doc Severinsen. “You’re not even thinking straight. You just assume you’re coming back for the rest.”

Lindemann and his wife fled Thursday, just hours before their home was overwhelmed by flames. They’ve since relocated to a friend’s unoccupied home in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“There’s no place to stay in L.A.,” he said. “Hotels are slammed, and the air quality is horrific. It is a bit of a war zone, as overused as that term is. And the winds of the fire are not done.”

The fires threatened to spread further as the winds picked up Wednesday, and Dr. Fleming said her team would remain vigilant. But she was also confident that they and the facilities were prepared for the worst, having anticipated long ago that fire would be an inevitable threat to the more than 125,000 items in their collections.

The 24-acre Getty Center campus opened on a hilltop in 1997, and architect Richard Meier kept fire in mind. The site is elevated, and the centre’s roof is made of fire-resistant crushed stone. More than a million square feet of Italian travertine stone was used in its construction. You must cross a plaza – nearly 200 metres of that same stone – to reach the doors of the museum itself, Dr. Fleming said, an additional buffer against wildfires.

The landscapes around both the Getty Center and the Villa, a replica of a Roman building that is home to Greco-Roman antiquities and was refurbished two decades ago, also play crucial roles in fire mitigation.

“The strategy is to deprive the fire of any fuel,” Dr. Fleming said.

The facilities’ groundskeepers keep an eye out for combustible materials, removing flammable ground cover and planting flame-resistant plants such as acacias along building edges. Lower tree canopies are trimmed out – “like trees out of a Dr. Seuss book,” Dr. Fleming said – so that fires “can blow through without having some readily burnable substance.”

Los Angeles has had uneven weather recently: two wet years that promoted overgrowth, followed by a dry one that effectively turned much of that overgrowth into kindling. Getty staff have spent much of the past 12 months removing it.

Within minutes of the fire alert near the Villa last week, Dr. Fleming said, staff shut air-intake valves across the building to avoid the chance of smoke or particulate matter damaging the collections. They kept portable humidifiers running to protect organic items, such as two sarcophagi, and sealed off individual areas of the building. (”I’d be more worried about the sprinkler system malfunctioning than a fire,” Dr. Fleming said.)

She and her team watched the flames near the Villa from a perch at the Getty Center. Two onsite fires caused concern, she said: one that seemed perilously near an outdoor stage that “looked like a birthday cake with a million sparklers on it,” and another near an exit.

The birthday-cake simulation turned out to be a rosemary shrub, which crackled in a threatening way but actually posed no risk. The other, Dr. Fleming recalled, was a dumpster fire – brush that had been safely cleared from the Villa’s grounds.

Neither localized fire wound up posing a risk to the museum. “That is exactly where you want the brush to be: a metal dumpster,” she said.