Driving north along the San Diego Freeway, the motorist leaving Los Angeles is struck by a vision of what appears to be a medieval castle on a hilltop guarding the Sepulveda Pass. But far from being meant to keep people out, this remarkable edifice is intended to attract huge numbers of the uninitiated to the joys of classical art. The new Getty Centre is one of the most ambitious and expensive exercises in the history of culture.The oil magnate J. Paul Getty collected art in an unspectacular way during his lifetime and built a relatively small museum up the coast in Malibu to house it. But in death his notorious parsimony deserted him, and he left $1,200 million to the museum. With its new resources the museum started to buy art seriously and in only 15 years has acquired a collection of 16th to 19th century European masters of worldwide importance, including Mantegna, Cellini, Rembrandt, Monet, Renoir and Cezanne. The need for new premises to house the riches was soon apparent.In earthquake-prone Los Angeles, the world capital of the more ephemeral arts of film and television, there seems to be a reluctance to build anything to last. Even after 200 years of history, there is no Empire State Building here. The only cathedral is closed to the public and falling down. The Getty deliberately decided to buck the trend.Architect Richard Meier has built four cubic galleries shrouded in pink-grey travertine stone - every block shipped from Italy. Alongside these are the offices of the Getty Trust and its education, conservation and research institutes, clad in curving panels of beige enamel and glass. In between are fountains, reflecting pools and gardens, with rectangular openings in the buildings deliberately scaled to frame the stunning views of the city and ocean beyond as if they were pictures.Now that 13 years of work are almost complete, Meier is clearly delighted with his handiwork. "When we see the reflections of the stone in the glass and in the water, they are things that come alive in ways that I couldn't plan and had no idea were possible," he says. "The architecture has this reflective quality that in this light is magical. It gives me a great deal of pleasure."Pleasure has been the goal all along, says the museum's director, John Walsh. "We wanted to give visitors an intensely pleasant place, with an alternation of experiences, looking at works of art closely and then having relaxing interludes in between, in a very beautiful setting."The building is massively reinforced to protect the treasures from the inevitable earthquakes. Computer-controlled louvres filter the intense Californian sunlight. A cable railway ferries visitors up and down the hill. A sense of opulence is everywhere. And for the visitors, it is all free.It has cost as near as makes no difference to $1,000 million. And there is still plenty of money left over to buy more works of art, such as the museum's current poster, van Gogh's Irises, which alone has changed hands for $54 million.

Sensitive to accusations of elitism, the Getty trustees decided with the new building to reach out to a wider audience, to show that art was not just a rich man's plaything and to bring in people who are not normally museum-goers. The results have been education programmes, grant programmes and a range of multi-media and computer systems designed to bring the art alive....This includes working with schools, not just to arrange museum visits but to develop educational materials and art projects for children to work on themselves. To attract people of college age, used to having music and video images around them all the time, "Friday Nights At The Getty" will offer performance art, poetry, concerts and theatre in an atmosphere "like a very large cafΘ", says education specialist Andy Clark. The idea is to "allow them to discover that art can be a very easy and natural part of one's life."Head of Education, Diane Drigham, is convinced she can reach this wider audience. "By relating works of art to their lives and helping them learn something more about themselves, the works of art become more relevant and more interesting," she says.The American arts establishment, based mainly in the east, has become fond of sneering at the Getty and its presumptuous efforts to buy itself into the big league. This ignores the fact that the centre of gravity of American life is inexorably shifting toward the Pacific. Says John Walsh: "Los Angeles has changed and matured very rapidly. The number of influential people who live and work here, who are highly educated, who are indistinguishable in their cultural habits from people in London or Dublin, has grown very greatly."Richard Meier adds: "I think the Getty Centre will have a profound effect on the way people perceive Los Angeles. People will want to come from all over the world."People were already coming, in advance of the museum's public opening on December 16th. For a "Kid's Congress on Art" the Trust flew in one teach and one school pupil from every state of the Union to see the place and then to head home spreading the word about art education.In the laconic way of American teenagers, their reactions to the Centre - "It's wonderful"; "It's big and it's unique"; "It's really, really neat" - are praise indeed. And to the fundamental question, "Why is art important?", one girl came up with the intriguing reply: "It softens the edge on life."