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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1991-1994: Riots and a risky strategy
The final design was announced and the project was put on a fast track to meet Disney’s deadline for an end-of-1992 groundbreaking. It was a risky strategy because fast tracking usually sacrifices cost for speed. Dworsky struggled to translate into pricing documents the three-dimensional complexities that came out of the Gehry/Nagata collaboration. At the same time, a recession, which had hit California particularly hard, deepened. The fully televised Rodney King riot in South Central Los Angeles shocked the nation and wracked the city, inspiring broad soul searching. A new home for the Philharmonic no longer felt like a top priority.
The Philharmonic had high hopes for its new music director, a young Finnish composer and conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Though government officials feared that fundraising had lagged the hall’s true cost, they agreed to begin construction on the garage in order to meet the Disney deadline. On paper, the funds in hand looked ample to cover the cost, still officially pegged at $110 million, but the estimate was based on early design documents. One overlooked danger signal was that the garage alone would come in at $81.5 million.
Salonen, Gehry, and Toyota continued to refine the design. “Frank focused on what you might call the semiotic response, what message the design sends,” observed Salonen in an interview. Explains Gehry, “I thought a symmetrical solution would be more comforting to the orchestra. I wanted to offer a psychological handrail for people.” For similar reasons, the hall was extensively clad in wood even though plaster would have offered the same acoustical benefit at lower cost. Adds Salonen, “We were completely in agreement with the openness of the design and the nonexclusive feeling of the seats.”
1994-1996: A mothballed masterpiece
The Northridge earthquake wrought billions in damage throughout the region in January, 1994. Contractors were inundated with urgent reconstruction projects, making it an inauspicious time to put the drawings for such an architecturally ambitious project out for pricing. The outcome stunned everyone involved: the project had unexpectedly risen to $160 million. “If you want to give a price on these drawings, you have to study them very carefully,” Daniel Dworsky told the Los Angeles Times. “This is a one-of-a-kind building. You don’t simply open up the plans and understand them quickly.” Gehry was cast by critics and the press in the role of spoiled, impractical artist. He struck back, publicly blaming Dworsky. “The executive architect was incapable of doing drawings that had this complexity,” he said in a recent interview. “We helped select that firm. I went to Daniel, supposedly a friend, and I told him this is going to fail and we now have the capability to do it, so let us ghost-write it.” Dworsky refused.
Gehry also blames a construction manager, whose job it was to monitor cost and construction issues, for failing to keep officials abreast of rising costs. But officials involved in the project now say there were also leadership problems at the Philharmonic and the Music Center, and so cost warnings went unaddressed. Fleischmann expresses surprise at the $110-million figure now, saying he always expected the project to cost much more. (The I. M. Pei-designed Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, had come in at $108 million five years earlier, for example.)
Facing $50-million more in fundraising as costs continued to creep upward, Disney officials ordered a detailed review. The extensive damage caused by the quake would spur yet more redesign as the hall’s steel structure was changed to a braced frame, further increasing costs since 80 percent of the steel had already been purchased. Late in 1994, when the fundraising gap looked insurmountable, the project was stopped. The county threatened to declare the project in default. The partly complete garage sat as a framed-concrete rebuke to all those who had supported Gehry’s hubris.
Was Gehry’s design too complex to cost? “I’d admit it if it was,” Gehry replied in an interview. “The stone exterior we designed, detailed and estimated came in on budget.” But a larger issue was at stake, he argued. “What every architect must understand is when you have an executive architect and a construction industry that sees that what you are doing is different and can’t understand it, you cannot stand idly by.You are fending off a lot of preconceptions. You must be parental, take charge, and explain. The client always wants to build something great and underestimates the budget. The business person always blames the architect.”
With the recession and the late 1980s banking crisis, downtown Los Angeles lost its bank headquarters and several corporations—the mainstay of corporate giving to major cultural projects. Los Angeles is too spread out, too centerless to support such a traditional “downtown” project, critics said. Hollywood, a traditional source of charitable donations, stayed away. (The name “Disney” on the hall did not enhance enthusiasm among executives at competing studios, either.) The Music Center and the Philharmonic rebuilt their own leadership and brought in real-estate management experts from Hines interests, but the project seemed utterly to have lost momentum. Gehry, who had been conspicuously overlooked for such important local projects as the Getty Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, described himself as a pariah in his hometown even as projects like the Frederick R. Weisman Museum, in Minneapolis, and the “Fred and Ginger” bank complex in Prague opened to acclaim.
By the end of 1995, costs (including those entailed in stopping the project) were pegged at $265 million. With the gift about to revert to the Disney family, the County granted the Music Center an extension on its lease as the Philharmonic pondered how to raise $100 million—fast.
1996: A rave leads to a revival
In March, the parking structure opened, but Disney Hall remained moribund. A turning point of sorts arrived, according to Fleischmann, with a series of Philharmonic concerts in Paris. Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote, “it is notable that the voice [the Philharmonic] did finally find was a voice the hometown crowd at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion never hears. In the live, intimate acoustic of the Châtelet, the Philharmonic sound has an arresting immediacy.” Board members who attended were “blown away,” said Swed in an interview. “The sound’s clarity and impact gave them a sense of what would be possible in a new hall.”
Director Richard Koshalek, a competition juror years earlier, put the weight of the Museum of Contemporary Art behind the Disney project by organizing a free exhibition celebrating the design. With models, computer renderings, and even a full-scale mockup of one of the curved, limestone-clad walls, MOCA drew a broad public into the intricacies of the acoustical and architectural collaboration. Even the fiercely competitive architectural community began to rally behind the project. Orchestrated by Thom Mayne, a long list of architects worldwide paid for and signed a full-page advertisement in the Times: “Build It and They Will Come” read the headline. The rate of new gifts accelerated.