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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1997: An impasse?
Eli Broad, a major local philanthropist who headed SunAmerica, a homebuilder, urged the Music Center and the Philharmonic to move the project forward with a design/build team that would include a new executive architect and confine Gehry’s role to that of consultant. “When Broad brought me that scenario, I said I couldn’t live with it,” said Gehry. Then came The Letter, a now-famous missive addressed to Broad, but shared with arts leaders and project funders, in which Gehry offered to withdraw. “The past few years have been difficult for me as I have taken a lot of heat for what has happened,” Gehry wrote. He argued that the Dworsky drawings remained inadequate and that a fourth of the detailing remained to be done. He claimed that changing course again might add as much as $30 million to the project. The letter also referred to Gehry's difficult personal relationship with Broad, for whom he had designed a house. “Some people have said that 75 percent of my building is better than none,” Gehry wrote. “That’s the way you did your house, and you are satisfied. Maybe you can do it again. My obligation to myself and to the Disney family makes it impossible for me to agree to such a process.”
The clash did not reach the impasse that many feared. “At stages in the process Frank lost heart,” explained Steven Rountree, the Music Center’s President. “But he remained an active, passionate participant. He built alliances with the Disney family, the orchestra, and the board.” And these alliances paid off. Diane Disney Miller, the daughter of Lillian, who had taken an increasingly active role in the hall’s progress had come to believe deeply in Gehry’s design. “We can’t let this go under,” she reportedly said to Mayor Richard Riordan. Riordan knew Gehry personally-they played hockey together—and he, too, had become a convert to the cause after a quiet trip to the Guggenheim Bilbao, which was nearing completion in Spain. (He would ultimately make a multimillion-dollar personal gift.) Andrea van de Kamp, the president of the Music Center’s board of directors, had also visited Bilbao with Randy Jefferson, one of the firm’s partners. “The experience is as close to an epiphany as I’ve ever had.”
Bilbao, relatively free of cost surprises and construction snafus, reinforced Gehry’s claims that his firm could do the job for a predictable sum. “I knew that if we blew this opportunity, it was one we could never regain,” van de Kamp said. She urgently summoned Zev Yaroslavsky, head of the County Board of Supervisors and a fellow symphony-goer. With his help, the city’s civic, business and governmental community at last lined up behind the project. It was Disney Miller, however, who most prominently insisted on retaining Gehry’s firm to complete the design (backing her case with a substantial additional donation), and she prevailed. “I didn’t know Diane,” said Gehry, “and I asked her later why she took my side. She said she saw it as a replay of when her father would be pushed around by the studios in creative disputes. She remembered the angst and anxiety in the family when he’d come home after days of this. She correctly read the dispute over my control of the completion of the project as the same kind of game and she didn’t want it.” Work commenced on the project again in August 1997 with Gehry’s office in charge.
Though the essential design had been firmed up by the end of 1991, Gehry was able to bring a new level of sculptural refinement to the interiors. Value engineers proposed a switch from exterior limestone cladding to less costly metal, over Gehry’s objections that the result would look like “son of Bilbao.” Later, he said he is happy with the change. A slablike office wing for the Los Angeles Philharmonic is added at the western edge of the site along with a 220-seat multi-function performance space for the California Institute of the Arts, dubbed the REDCAT, but these both arrive with additional funding. Fundraising took off as the economy rebounded and faith in Gehry and the new management solidified. (The tumultuous hosannas accompanying the October opening of the Bilbao Guggenheim greatly assisted.) Lillian Disney died at age 98. Realization of her great dream was still almost five years off.
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