The Getty Trust consolidated all its entities and activities when it moved to the New Getty Center in December of 1997. The move, long in its coming, was preceded by years of programming and designing. Well along in the process, The Getty began to think about The Getty Villa in Malibu and what its function would be, since it could not abandon it. In 1993, after a long international search for a design firm that could undertake the master planning of the site, and with a wonderful yet vague mandate, our firm was chosen together with five others to participate in, at that time, a most unusual final selection process. Instead of a competition, The Getty asked these six teams to work for two weeks recording their thoughts, reactions and ideas, triggered by a briefing and a day-long site visit. The brief was based on a very much felt but loosely structured set of desires and requirements: Correct the entrance to the museum. Address issues of accessibility. Open up the site to the public. Include other entities of The Getty. Include an outdoor classical theater. Although we could do whatever we wanted to address this brief, the requirement was that it be registered in a sketch book, 14" x 17", which was provided to each of the participants. The search committee traveled to the architects' offices, and spent a day with them talking about the book itself, the architects' work, their offices, and visiting their built work in the area. We were chosen after this round, and it may be worth now to comment a bit on our approach to the sketchbook.

We took The Getty at its word and did not produce "A Project" for the Getty Villa but, mostly, architectural vignettes of things that we associated with what we had seen, heard, and what we understood as the aspirations. We produced sketches that stressed the character of any new intervention, and quite simply vignettes of things we liked. We wrote our thoughts as they came to our minds.