WHEN IN ROME.(Getty Museum, Malibu, California)

In the nineteen-seventies, the Getty Museum built itself a home in Malibu, California, in the form of an imitation Roman villa from the first century. There was something undeniably kitschy about the notion of putting a make-believe classical villa atop a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean and calling it a museum, but nobody seemed to mind. This was Los Angeles, after all, and so what if the overdecorated galleries, with their damask wall coverings and trompe-l'oeil murals, gave the museum's interior the feeling of a mogul's mansion in Bel Air? Then the Getty grew up. In 1976, its eccentric founder, the oilman J. Paul Getty, died, leaving the bulk of his multibillion-dollar estate to the museum, which suddenly became the world's richest cultural institution. The museum morphed into the Getty Trust and spent a billion dollars constructing the Getty Center, a pristine modernist campus by Richard Meier, on top of a steep hill in Brentwood, thirteen miles east of Malibu.

The trust was obviously eager to leave behind its arriviste beginnings, and the villa could easily have become the most upscale condo conversion in Los Angeles history. Instead, the Getty came up with a more imaginative, and more costly, idea: it decided to give its strange building a chance to be taken seriously. The trust announced that it would turn the Malibu villa into a museum of antiquities, filling it with objects that were created in the period that the building--a replica of the Villa dei Papiri, in Herculaneum--was intended to evoke. It was a risky move, since it wasn't clear if this approach would make the building look more dignified or even sillier.

It took a dozen years and two hundred and seventy-five million dollars to renovate the villa and surround it with a series of modernist buildings, including an entry pavilion, an amphitheatre, a parking garage, a cafe, an auditorium, an education center, and a shop. The project's architects are Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, of Boston, rigorous modernists who have a love of classicism and believe that an architect best respects history not by imitating it but by teasing its spirit into new forms. Machado and Silvetti are about as far as you can get from Norman Neuerburg, who designed the original villa, and it seemed an odd match: there is nothing overtly charming about Machado and Silvetti's work, while Neuerburg's design was a vast, sprawling exercise in cuteness.

The campus that Machado and Silvetti have created is a bracing collage of old and new, and the villa has been nearly magically transformed. The task was surely made easier by the fact that the French furniture and Old Master paintings are gone from the villa, and its new contents have a genuine connection to ancient Rome. (In fact, some items in the collection may belong to Rome; the Getty has been accused of acquiring a significant number of looted artifacts.) But it takes more than hauling away some gilded frames to make a ponderous building into a gracious one. Instead of slavishly replicating Roman architecture (although various touches, such as new floors of bronze, mosaic, and marble, reveal a high level of scholarship), Machado and Silvetti have acknowledged the past without imitating it. They have boldly reorganized the villa, creating more logical routes through it and adding fifty-eight windows and three skylights, to bring natural light into the galleries. One of the best things in the villa now is a new main stair, of bronze, glass, and hand-carved Spanish stone; a meticulous modernist composition, it is broad, sumptuous, and serene, and a crisp counterpoint to the classical-looking environment around it. The effect is playful and knowing: in Italy, contemporary alterations to ancient Roman structures are often made in such a bluntly modern style, to make clear which elements are authentically old. Here, of course, the "original" details date from 1974.

By treating the barely old as a revered object, Machado and Silvetti somehow make visitors feel that this building is no longer an object of ridicule but, rather, worthy of respect. It is an understated, sly maneuver, and they do it without ...