How Frank Gehry’s design and Lillian Disney’s dream were rescued to create the masterful Walt Disney Concert Hall
Architectural Record, November 2003
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In May, 1987, Ernest Fleischmann, the executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, took an urgent telephone call while waiting for a flight in New York. The call was about a gift, one of the most extraordinary ever offered any cultural institution, let alone an orchestra. Lillian Disney, the widow of Walt, had offered $50 million to build a new home for the Philharmonic. It seemed unbelievably auspicious. While the gift would not cover the entire cost, it would drastically reduce the fundraising burden. No one knew at the time that building Walt Disney Hall would ultimately consume the next 16 years and cost more than five times the sum Mrs. Disney had offered.
Since 1964, the Philharmonic had played in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, one of three performing–arts halls in Los Angeles’ Music Center complex. Architect Welton Beckett had mounted the center on a chilly raised plaza and surrounded it by an arcade, an uneasy marriage of Modernist style and classicist form that was typical of an arts acropolis of its time. The barnlike Chandler—long famous as home of the Academy Awards—swallowed the orchestra’s sound. A parcel had been reserved across the street for future expansion, and it was for this site that Mrs. Disney offered her gift, with approval of the county, which owned it. She also specified a deadline of December 31, 1992 for groundbreaking.
1987-1988: Chain–link architect for a champagne client
Fleischmann and a committee assembled to manage the construction visited many of the world’s great halls. Two that particularly impressed the group were not on the usual greatest–hit lists. One was the Berlin Philharmonie, a dramatically expressionistic composition of terraced and overlapping tiers completed in 1963 to a design by Hans Scharoun with acoustician Lothar Cremer. The other acoustical standout was Suntory Hall, 1986, In Tokyo (Yasui Architects) where the acoustical consultant had been Nagata Acoustics, a firm well–known only in Japan.
In the meantime, an architectural subcommittee winnowed a list of 80 architects down to four who would compete for the commission: Gottfried Bohm, of Cologne, Germany; Hans Hollein, Vienna; James Stirling Michael Wilford, London; and Frank O. Gehry. The Europeans all had more impressive resumes: they all had won the Pritzker Prize; Gehry had not. They all had built acclaimed major projects (museums in the case of Stirling Wilford and Hollein), but none of the competitors had designed a major concert space. Gehry, however, had long worked with the Philharmonic to enhance the Hollywood Bowl and had built two outdoor concert pavilions.
1988-1991: A hometown trophy and a Pritzker
The prospect of Gehry rankled many close to the project. He was a “wild man” who would give the orchestra plywood instead of stone and chain link instead of polished brass. Nevertheless, the committee announced the choice of Gehry’s scheme, contending that it “belongs especially to Los Angeles and will be perceived internationally as a mark of our cultural maturity.” Set behind a domed greenhouse that Gehry dubbed “a living room for the city,” the hall would seat 2,265 (1,000 fewer than Chandler) and was optimistically slated to open May 1992.
A working budget of $115 million was established, but in fact no one at the beginning of 1989 knew what the real scope of the project would be—the competitors had all worked from sketchy, provisional criteria. The real cost would await a detailed design process with an acoustician on board. But the directive from Mrs. Disney had been clear: it should strive to match the best halls in the world.
Typical of large, public projects, Dworsky Associates agreed to take Gehry’s schematic design through working drawings as executive architect. The Philharmonic, with Gehry’s enthusiastic approval, hired Nagata Acoustics, the consultant that had produced Suntory Hall. Minoru Nagata subscribed to the largely unscientific yet common–sense notion of “psycho-acoustics”—if people feel comfortable and like the visual qualities of an auditorium, they’ll like the sound better. Yasuhisa Toyota, who completed Disney after Nagata retired, likes to work closely with architects who have strong ideas as long as they listen. “We think about how to support the architect so that he can freely design,” he explained. And Gehry, a self–described musical dilettante, listened.
With Nagata, he essentially started from scratch on the hall, producing 82 models at 1/16–inch scale based on configurations for great halls in the world, from Vienna to Amsterdam to Boston. To strike a balance between an immersing visual experience and excellent sound, Gehry and Nagata discarded well–regarded historic types, evolving a unique hall form, one that drew on the exciting, audience–involving assymmetric arrangement of Berlin—which surrounds the stage with listeners in so–called “vineyard” tiers—and the symmetrical, but similarly tiered layout of Suntory.
The Los Angeles design, however, had to be reconciled with the County’s desire to add revenue–generating components to the site. A parking garage was to be built under the hall. Later the team tried to accommodate a 350–room hotel, but it fell through. A chamber–music hall was originally part of the project, but was jettisoned. Each change involved a thorough redesign.
Though the Philharmonic’s music director, Andre Previn, resigned in 1989, it was a good year for Gehry. He won his Pritzker, and his design sensibility had evolved. He had by then begun wrapping overlapping sinuous curves around the blocky, sometimes self–consciously clunky forms he had become known for. The first realized work in this new direction, the Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein, Switzerland, established Gehry as a figure of international significance. As his work took on increasing geometric complexity, partner Jim Glymph pioneered the use of CATIA, the three–dimensional modeling software that would help assure that Gehry’s enriched formal vocabulary could be built to budget.
Designing Disney with sketchy paper models, Gehry fixed four soaring wedge shapes to the outwardly canted rectangular box containing the auditorium, clustering around the hall chunky smaller shapes for lobbies and ancillary functions. As design proceeded, the shapes softened to fluttering shells or curved conelike shapes clad in limestone. These gestures were Gehry’s way of acknowledging Lillian Disney’s love of flowers and gardens. “She didn’t understand the outside,” Gehry confesses. “She would send people with books of ducky ponds and thatched roofs and say, ‘Could you consider . . . .’ She loved the interior, though.”
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