GAD Editorial · Published ·
Downtown Los Angeles spent most of the twentieth century trying to give itself a centre. On 23 October 2003, it got one: Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, a billowing composition in stainless steel that finally gave Bunker Hill a reason for the skyline to look at.
The building is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and its 2,265-seat auditorium was designed from the inside out. Gehry worked with the acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota to shape a vineyard-style hall — the audience wraps around the stage in terraced blocks — where the geometry of the room is itself the instrument. The famous story is that the exterior was originally going to be stone; the switch to metal came late, and the curves that resulted are pure Gehry: sails, waves, a ship forever arriving.
The steel fought back at first. The polished panels reflected concentrated sunlight onto neighbouring condominiums, and the worst offenders had to be dulled. But the building settled into the city the way all great landmarks do — by becoming the background of everyone's photographs and the foreground of the city's self-image. Bilbao had proved Gehry could remake a city from the outside in; Disney Hall proved the harder trick, making the inside — the sound — the point of the sculpture.
Key facts
- Completed: 2003 (opened 23 October 2003)
- Location: Downtown Los Angeles, California, USA
- Architect: Frank Gehry
- Program: 2,265-seat concert hall; home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; acoustics by Yasuhisa Toyota
- Construction: stainless-steel cladding over a vineyard-style auditorium