Word: disneyized
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...city devoted to spectacle, Los Angeles doesn't have many places where you can just sit around and take things in. The Walt Disney Concert Hall, Frank Gehry's magnificent new building, is located across the street from a big multilevel parking lot. That's a very Los Angeles place to be, of course, but not a great place to be seen from. Gehry's other masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, stretches out along the Nervion River, across from any number of cafes, where you can kick back and enjoy how it reclines along the water like Cleopatra...
...long time, trouble was an appropriate word too. "We went through hell," says Gehry, sitting amid the huge bustle of his office in a converted warehouse in Santa Monica. "But in the end, we made it work." That's putting it mildly on both counts. The Disney Hall may be one of the most anguished creative triumphs since the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But now that it's here, it can be counted on to reverberate not just through L.A. but across the U.S., raising the stakes everywhere for what a building...
...began in 1987, when Lillian Disney, Walt's widow, provided a surprise gift of $50 million to build a new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which for years had been unhappily stashed in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a slab of '60s-style bureaucratic neoclassicism with mediocre acoustics. The following year Gehry won the competition to design the new hall. At the time--a decade before the debut at Bilbao--Gehry was best known as the man who made chain link and plywood into respectable building materials. Lillian, who was nearing 90 and whose taste ran to brick and thatched...
...Harrison's Concerto in Slendro and also to the sustained, exalted moan of Mahler's Fifth Symphony? Can the huff and puff of the Carmina Burana sound any good in the same space where soprano Dawn Upshaw unfolds that lucid, liquid C? The curving interior of the Disney Hall was developed by Gehry with Yasuhisa Toyota, a partner in the Tokyo firm Nagata Acoustics...
...time when symphony orchestras are losing their audience, no word frightened the supporters of the Disney Hall more than elitism. It was essential to make a place where both Shostokovich and Shrek could feel at home. Disney, who had Leopold Stokowski shake hands on camera with Mickey Mouse, loved classical music, but he loved the public, too. Gehry's design thoroughly digests the Western architectural vocabulary without quoting literally from it. The free-form silhouette is just right for a concert hall in multimultiethnic Los Angeles, a city that doesn't look to Europe for much beyond designer shoes...