Herzog & de Meuron reveal plans for Berggruen Institute site north of the Getty Center

Is Los Angeles still the sort of city that pursues hugely ambitious cultural and architectural projects? Or is it a city that's running out of room and chastened by increasingly aggressive opposition to new development?

Preliminary designs for the Berggruen Institute, just north of the Getty Center, suggest it's both. Or maybe navigating a slow transition from one to the other.

On a spectacular site covering 447 acres, the billionaire philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen is planning, as the new headquarters for the 7-year-old institute that bears his name, a low-slung and generally restrained campus of buildings. It will be designed by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron (with L.A.’s Gensler) and set within a landscape by Michel Desvigne and Inessa Hansch.

Berggruen gave The Times an advance look at the preliminary designs, which he said he planned to file Wednesday with the Los Angeles Department of City Planning. They’re executed in what Herzog & de Meuron co-founder Jacques Herzog called a “basic, very archaic” register, to be built mostly of concrete and untreated wood.

The proposal has the feel of a last-of-its-kind design. It recalls a Los Angeles that has just about disappeared, a city of grand projects built on huge swaths of open land. At the same time it reflects the limits that come with both distrust of new construction — especially on the Westside — and a rising ecological anxiety.

The institute (which is also planning a smaller satellite location in the MacArthur Park section of Los Angeles) is a public-policy think tank of sorts focusing on good governance in California, among other subjects. At the new campus it plans to make space available for scholars in residence as well as limited public programs.

The designs call for a linear park — what the architects call a “gardened plinth” — made up of three sections and strung along a ridge pointing south, offering views over the Pacific Ocean in one direction and toward downtown and the San Gabriel Mountains in the other. Near the northern end of the ridge will be a residence for Berggruen and his family; in the middle will be a “village” for visiting scholars, consisting of 15 units with private patios and gardens and partially sunken below ground; and to the south will be the largest structure, lifted 12 feet aboveground and known as the Frame, holding meeting rooms, offices, study spaces and other facilities around a garden courtyard. Emerging from the Frame will be a pair of spheres, the larger one holding a 250-seat lecture hall and the smaller a water storage tank.

Berggruen and Herzog both stressed their interest in maintaining a light footprint on the site, just west of the 405 Freeway in the Santa Monica Mountains, with at least 90% of the land remaining undeveloped. The residential community of Mountain Gate, directly north of the institute campus, will be keenly interested to see what Berggruen plans to build.

During a walk across the site on a recent afternoon — during which a rattlesnake reared up out of nowhere on a dusty path and rattled loudly, as if to warn against bringing too much activity here too quickly — Berggruen tried to sum up its appeal.

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Chris Alexakisart, Los Angeles