New Getty Grants Will Help Preserve 10 Gems of Modernist Architecture Around the World

Massive concrete spans, buoyant sculptural forms, and shimmering stretches of glass: these are some of the celebrated innovations that define modern architecture. They also pose significant challenges to preservation, as the experimental materials and techniques developed by architects and designers worldwide age differently with time. Their spirit of questioning has brought us to a moment of reckoning if these building are to endure in the future. And this is where the Getty is making a difference.

To address this challenge, today the Getty Foundation announced ten new grants as part of its Keeping It Modern initiative, which will fund needed research, testing, analysis, planning and/or treatment for innovative twentieth-century buildings. These range from a Soviet-era monument to a soaring exhibition hall, and from an inventive railway station to a beloved church. (See all 10 of the buildings below.)

For the first time in the initiative’s six-year history, grants have been awarded for important sites in Argentina, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Mozambique, Spain, and Uganda. The majority of the projects support conservation planning, and many include proposals for adaptive reuse—the repurposing of buildings for uses other than the ones for which they were originally intended.

Including these new grants, Keeping It Modern has supported 64 conservation projects since launching in 2014. Each is a model for how to approach the preservation of other related buildings worldwide—knowledge that is shared through the Keeping It Modern Report Library, which offers free access to completed technical reports and conservation management plans.

In addition to preserving individual buildings of significance, each of the new grant projects will contribute to our growing knowledge of how to study, treat, and preserve modern architecture.

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