Center Pushes High-Tech Envelope

Richard Paice is confident that neither faulty power supplies nor bad bearings nor the thick metal tow-ropes falling off their tracks will stop the Getty Center tramway from making its appointed rounds.

These problems have been solved in the 20 months since the high-tech people-mover was finished. What worries Paice, the tram maintenance supervisor, are cats and hats, which have a tendency to find their way onto the tram guideway, tripping the collision-avoidance light beams and shutting down the system.

And then there’s those pesky passengers. “My biggest concern is people fiddling,” Paice said. “In every crowd there’s an inquisitive person,” and they might be inclined to, say, open the emergency panel to see what’s inside, bringing the tram to an instant stop.

The tramway is just one of a range of unique high-tech systems at the Getty that are about to be put to their first full-on test when the new center opens to the public Dec. 16. Managers are confident that years of preparation have minimized the chances of failures, but they have also learned to expect the unexpected.

A computer-controlled louver system for providing natural light to the museum’s art galleries--the most ambitious of its kind in the world--has tested the imagination of lighting designers and facilities managers, though early problems appear to be solved.

The cutting-edge computer network that connects every corner of the center with fiber-optic cable for high-speed communications has had its share of glitches.

Technicians and museum personnel are racing to complete the Art Access computer system, which will enable visitors to see images of works of art that aren’t on display and tap a vast multimedia database of information about the entire Getty collection.

Other systems are working fine, notably a climate control apparatus designed to make the air inside the museum cleaner than anything outside a computer-chip factory, but no one knows exactly how they will be affected by the arrival of large crowds.

“As a general principle, the Getty tries to use technologies that are not at the cutting edge, but just behind,” said Steve Rountree, vice president of the Getty Trust. “But sometimes you’re either way behind, or you’re ahead.”

If all goes well, the Getty Center will stand as a model of modern museum design. If there are problems--especially with the trams and the louver system--there will be many irritated guests and red-faced officials.

And no matter what happens, the effort provides an interesting example of the risks and rewards of doing things that haven’t been done before.

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For visitors, the high-tech aspect of the Getty experience will begin with the tramway. A kind of cross between a funicular and a Hovercraft, it has two driverless trains of three cars each, and travels the steep path at 14 mph.

These trains don’t have any wheels, and the concrete guideway doesn’t have any tracks. Instead, the cars have electric motors that blow air straight down through pancake-like rubber pads. The trains thus float just a hair above the guideway, and they’re pulled up and down the hill by a cable.

For most of its 3,536-foot length, the guideway is only one lane wide, and the two trains pass at a wide spot in the middle. This seems to resemble a funicular system such as the Angels Flight Railway--in which the two cars are attached to the same cables and essentially pull one another up and down--but the Getty tram has two fully independent systems that are synchronized by computer.

David Perl, head of Otis Transit Systems, the company that built the tram, denies that any of this is especially high-tech. “It’s a pretty simple system,” he said. Other driverless people-movers require complicated signaling to keep track of the vehicles, he says, but with a cable-driven system there’s no need to worry about any of that.

But even though five other similar systems are in operation around the world, none have the steep grade and winding path of the Getty tram, which hugs a Brentwood hillside above the San Diego Freeway. Rountree says site characteristics severely limited the technology choices for the people-mover.

Otis struggled at first to make the system work reliably: The hills and curves made for very intricate “roping,” and the two cables had a disturbing tendency to slip off their tracks. That was solved by installing flat squares of aluminum just below some of the 1800-odd “sheaves,” or guidance wheels, to physically block the cables from falling off.

Now Paice’s main worry is the light beams that detect objects in the guideway and shut down the system. And if people insist on tinkering, that could cause enough delays to seriously slow the needed flow of 1,200 people per hour up the hill. The Getty has contracted with a bus company to be on alert, just in case.

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When visitors enter the museum, they’ll be immersed in an extraordinarily controlled environment, one in which every imaginable step has been taken to protect the art.

Consider, for starters, the air. It will always be 72 degrees, give or take 1.5 degrees, even if the air-conditioning system malfunctions (there’s a back-up). The relative humidity will always be 52%--even when the Santa Ana winds are blowing, though that weather condition did require some special adjustments. And the air will be clean, very clean.

A heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system sucks air in from the outside, a filter takes out about 30% of any particle pollution, another filter takes out 95% percent of what’s left, and a carbon filter removes stray gases.

Then, after the outside air is mixed with recirculated indoor air, the whole filtering process is repeated before the air is heated or cooled, adjusted for humidity, and blown into the museum.

But air pollution as we traditionally think of it is not the only concern. Art can also be harmed by indoor pollution that arises from paint, carpeting, cleaning solutions, fixtures and many other materials.

The Getty Conservation Institute, the wing of the trust devoted to art conservation and restoration, tested every material in the museum for “off-gassing” or other kinds of pollution. In the end, about 800 materials were tested, and about 100 were rejected as being too dirty.

Even the Getty, though, with all its resources, can’t predict just what effects large crowds of people--with their dirty shoes and makeup and fibrous clothing--might have on the air quality. So the Getty is funding a joint study with Caltech and a lab in Oxford, England, to quantify exactly the effectiveness of the filtration systems.

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Perhaps the museum’s most important innovation is its louver lighting system. Resembling giant Venetian blinds lying on their side, the louvers are positioned over the skylights of the second-floor galleries, and they adjust themselves to the daylight every two hours to provide just the right amount of indirect natural light.

Although the concept seems relatively simple--and critics say it has created a brilliant environment for viewing art--the louver system is much more complicated than it seems, and getting it all to work right has proved devilishly difficult.

The goal of the system, said Paul Marantz, senior partner of the New York lighting design firm Fisher Marantz, Renfro, Stone, and head of the project, was to let in enough natural light to illuminate the paintings but block direct sunlight--while avoiding the use of diffusing glass or other material that would block the sky and take away the feeling of openness.

In addition, the museum wanted to preserve the different character of the light at different times of day. And each gallery, in turn, had somewhat different light characteristics, depending on the wall coverings and other factors.

Using photo cells on the ceilings of each gallery combined with hand-held light meters, workers have spent months painstakingly measuring light levels in every gallery on different days and at different times of day.

These levels were entered into a computer system, and the louvers move automatically to preset levels depending on the day and time. If unexpected clouds darken a gallery, the light sensors are supposed to detect it, wait 10 minutes, and then move the louvers to full open and gradually bring up the lights.

From the outset, though, there were problems with the accuracy of the photo cells. Computer bugs caused the louvers to occasionally close without warning.

And the biggest problem was unexpected variations in how the machinery of the 88 separate louver sets interpreted different settings, creating light spots and dark spots in the galleries.

“There was nothing like this done before that we could copy from,” said Rick Pribnow, manager of plant engineering for the Getty. “There were a lot of sleepless nights.”

Marantz compared the problem of establishing precise louver levels to calibrating the flaps on an airplane: “There are extremely accurate and repeatable positions that got worked out over a very long period of time,” he said, and doing that on a never-before-built system was “stupendously difficult.”

Ultimately, the problem was solved by installing electronic inclinometers--a kind of computerized level--on one of the blades of each louver set.

They now provide far more precise feedback to the system on the exact louver level. And the computer has been programmed to tolerate slight variations in the sought-after angle, so that the imprecise electric motors don’t jerk the louvers back and forth in search of exactly the right setting.

The process of fine-tuning the system, Marantz says, will probably go on for years.

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Although the bugs in the louver system seem to have been worked out with time to spare, the Art Access computer system is in a race to the finish.

Based on a powerful multimedia database that will ultimately serve a broad range of functions, Art Access is designed to enable visitors to see works that aren’t on display, read background information, learn about related works and even create their own customized tours of the museum.

About 20 public terminals will be available in four separate rooms in the museum, and visitors will navigate the system via a simple touch-screen interface. Much of the design was done by a Virginia-based company called ThunderWave that had built a similar system for the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

A team of 15 people are working feverishly to complete the texts that will accompany the pictures and the videos, while programmers slot the texts, images and videos into the database.

The descriptions, said Ken Hamma, the museum curator in charge of the project, “were all written specifically for this system, and for this kind of media. They have more information than on the labels [in the museum itself] but less than there is in the catalog.”

The challenge in building the system, Hamma said, was to create a highly flexible design so that individual elements in any media--text, still photo, video or audio--could be easily added on a continual basis by nontechnical personnel, and used for different applications.

Thus a curator might be able to view a highly sophisticated description and history of an object, while a visitor would get a simpler description--yet the separate systems would rely on the same underlying database of images and other material. The video has been a particular challenge because the standards for storing and viewing digital video are just now being established.

“We’re out in front of the standards,” said Hamma. “We’re making it up as we go along.”

That philosophy, in fact, has driven much of the information technology infrastructure at the Getty. The entire center is wired with a fiber-optic network that uses an advanced data-switching system put together by Xylan, a Calabasas company.

The network, and its associated roomful of computers known as servers, provides the basic computing and communications infrastructure for the entire Getty Center, supporting everything from Art Access to staff e-mail, payroll, and the elaborate cataloging systems of the Information Institute and the Research Institute.

When Getty officials put out the initial design specifications for the network in 1995, “they were way out on the edge,” said Xylan co-founder Doug Hill. “They were trying to shoot ahead of where the industry was.”

Data networking is one of the fastest changing fields in the computer world, but observers say the Getty appears to have done a good job in picking its technology. “In terms of the overall IS [information systems], we’re very close to the bleeding edge,” Rountree said. “But investing as much as we were, we had to go out and grab it, because the real risk was being behind the curve.”

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Floating on Air

Most visitors to the Getty Museum will approach without touching the ground. Moving at 14 mph, floating on a thin cushion of air, the tram is pulled by cables up the mountainside. One of six such trains world-wide, the Getty tram is the only one to climb so steeply and negotiate so many curves. A look at some of the technology involved:

1) Steel cables: Each tram is pulled by a cable 1.75 miles long. Designed to pull up to 70 tons, the cables are made of steel strands wrapped around a core.

2) Light beams: Infrared beams criss-cross the track, detecting obstacles in the tram’s path.

3) Guide rail: Wheels on the side of the cars roll along the rail, ensuring that each tram hugs its own side of the tramway.

4) Power lines: Provide electricity for the blower engines. If power fails, air would stop flowing, and the tram would come to rest on support skids.

5) Blower pads: Blowers force air through small holes in the rubber base of the pads, exerting a pressure of 27 pounds per square inch. Sixty pads per tram suspend the vehicle (weighing up to 36 tons fully loaded with passengers) just above the pavement.

Source: Richard Paice, Otis Transit Systems, The Getty Institute

Researched by REBECCA PERRY / Los Angeles Times

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Light Gallery

Fearful of sunlight’s damaging effects, few of the world’s art museums allow their treasures to be seen as they were intended to be viewed--bathed in natural lights. The Getty Museum is one of the few. Using a system of computer-controlled louvers and light sensors, sunlight illuminating the 20 painting galleries will be maintained at at constant 200-250 lux level--deemed safe by the conservation department. To achieve this, a remarkable array of technologies has been employed.

1) Sun louvers: Open widest in the morning, the louvers are programmed to close incrementally each hour until midday, limiting the amount of light admitted as the sun climbs higher. In the afternoon, the process is reversed, with the louvers opening as the light dims. The programmed positions change every two weeks, matching the sun’s changing angle during the year.

2) Photo cells: Sensors measure the light falling on the gallery walls and outside the building. Soon after a sudden burst of sunlight or a drop in the light level, louver positions are adjusted and lights may turn on to maintain a constant level.

3) Sprinklers: The sprinkler system uses compressed air as a kind of cork. If smoke is detected, the air is released and water moves into position. If heat is sensed, water flows through the sprinkler heads. By using copper piping and frequently recirculating fresh water through the system, the liquid is kept free from discoloration that could damage paintings.

4) Climate control: Around 2,000 cubic feet of air per minute is pumped through ducts in the baseboards and ceiling moulding in each gallery room. Air is maintained at 72 degrees with 52% humidity. Outside air is filtered and constantly added to the system. Levels of particulate matter and gasses are monitored and studied by conservationists.

Source: The Getty Institute

Researched by REBECCA PERRY / Los Angeles Times