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On Disney and Beyond
Will the New Concert Hall Steal the Spotlight or Illuminate Downtown?
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By Sam Hall Kaplan
All eyes are on and all ears tuned to the Walt Disney Concert Hall these days for the extended opening of the shimmering stainless steel-clad home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
The musical programs promise to be appropriately commemorative, while the architecture, we know, is striking atop Bunker Hill, resembling a landlocked billowing sailing vessel.
There certainly will be photo opportunities galore at the inaugural gala concerts, which will stretch over three days beginning Thursday. They follow several closed previews for select school children, construction workers and community leaders held last week to accommodate wide-eyed interest and to counter elitist overtones prompted by escalated ticket prices and limited seating.
Also drowned out by the blare of a well-orchestrated publicity campaign has been the criticism of the $274 million cost of the Frank Gehry, computer-generated design of the hall, coming at a time when an aggregation of city facilities and services are in decline and in desperate need.
Perhaps the same resolve that completed the Disney Concert Hall could be applied to, say, the Belmont Learning Complex, which sits unfinished less than a mile to the west with a nearly identical price tag. Certainly if the engineers could solve the countless construction problems the singular design of the hall presented they could do the same for Belmont.
Not since the opening of the 1984 Olympics or the premiere a few years ago of the sequel to Star Wars has there been such a hyped opening in Los Angeles. Boosters hail the resulting buzz as the overture to the transformation of Downtown as a tourist destination; that first evidence of the so-called "Bilbao effect," a phrase generated by the flamboyantly designed Guggenheim Museum Gehry fashioned in Bilbao, Spain.
After the opening there, the museum, which is similar in style to Disney Hall, albeit in titanium, generated an avalanche of visitors who in turn melted into a flood of economic activity and income for the struggling gritty city. While by far in another league if not galaxy from Bilbao, with so much more to offer, L.A. could always use another attraction. Disney Hall certainly promises to be one.
So far the results have been mixed. The critics who have toured the building, as I have, were impressed. I loved its sculptural qualities, from a distance and in the interior, which I thought was grand yet intimate. But I had problems with how it relates to, and works with, the surrounding streets. I concluded that Gehry's forte was sculpture, not urban design.
Most critics and commentators have been more than impressed, some in sycophantic awe. "Frozen music," wrote one. "The hall is an exuberant pile of twisting steel encasing public spaces of generosity and wit," declared another. "Infinitely finer, follow up to Bilbao." And "an architectural experience of immense power and subtlety."
To a person simply loving the hall as an icon and eye-catcher, they similarly have put down or dismissed Downtown. It makes you wonder if they all drove into the bowels beneath the hall to park, rode the escalator into the lobby, and never set foot on the streets, or ever walked Downtown and enjoyed its many landmarks.
Their throwaway lines and misrepresentations do not inspire confidence in their coverage, while raising questions how much indeed the hall will boost Downtown, be it among tourists or Westsiders.
"Downtown Los Angeles is an oxymoron. And it is hardly the place which first comes to mind when we think of culture," wrote a British critic. "Los Angeles, as we know, is a city shaped by the car. The Disney Hall is designed to be understood at the speed of the freeways that hedge it in, and it sits on a huge car park that will funnel countless commuters who park here on the way to work through its lobbies."
"Downtown Los Angeles has only a handful of singular pieces of architecture - Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue's Central Library of 1926, Arata Isozaki's Museum of Contemporary Art of 1986, and Rafael Moneo's Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, finished last year - and Disney Hall is now surely the most distinguished building in the area," declared the critic for The New Yorker.
"It is, indeed, monumental," he continued, "but it isn't fair to say that it doesn't respond to its urban context, which is, more or less, like the downtowns of many other major American cities - a lot of glass skyscrapers surrounded by a lot of freeways. Disney Hall is set on Grand Avenue, a boulevard almost as wide as a freeway, and the site has a steep grade, making it even more unfriendly to pedestrians."
"It could exert a major impact on the city's feeble downtown, its contorted, lumpy profile looming impressively over the skyline," declared another sojourning commentator. "Yet, like so much in L.A., it is an architecture which looks impressive from inside a car or coming out of one of the city's nearby exclusive restaurants, but ignores the sidewalk."
Countered another out-of-town critic: "It is ironic that Gehry is being criticized for not producing a building that will transform a dreary, lifeless downtown area, since that is what he did more successfully than any other living architect when he designed the Guggenheim in Bilbao."
Let us hope that soon they will be commenting on the "L.A. effect," or better yet, the "Downtown L.A. Effect." That is if they can find it beyond the glimmering walls of the Disney Concert Hall.
Sam Hall Kaplan is an Emmy award-winning reporter for FOX 11 News and the author of L.A. Lost & Found.
(page 3, 10/20/03)
© Los Angeles Downtown News. Reprinting items retrieved from the archives are for personal use only. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission of the Los Angeles Downtown News. If you would like to re-distribute anything from the Los Angeles Downtown News Archives, please call our permissions department at (213) 481-1448.
The musical programs promise to be appropriately commemorative, while the architecture, we know, is striking atop Bunker Hill, resembling a landlocked billowing sailing vessel.
There certainly will be photo opportunities galore at the inaugural gala concerts, which will stretch over three days beginning Thursday. They follow several closed previews for select school children, construction workers and community leaders held last week to accommodate wide-eyed interest and to counter elitist overtones prompted by escalated ticket prices and limited seating.
Also drowned out by the blare of a well-orchestrated publicity campaign has been the criticism of the $274 million cost of the Frank Gehry, computer-generated design of the hall, coming at a time when an aggregation of city facilities and services are in decline and in desperate need.
Perhaps the same resolve that completed the Disney Concert Hall could be applied to, say, the Belmont Learning Complex, which sits unfinished less than a mile to the west with a nearly identical price tag. Certainly if the engineers could solve the countless construction problems the singular design of the hall presented they could do the same for Belmont.
Not since the opening of the 1984 Olympics or the premiere a few years ago of the sequel to Star Wars has there been such a hyped opening in Los Angeles. Boosters hail the resulting buzz as the overture to the transformation of Downtown as a tourist destination; that first evidence of the so-called "Bilbao effect," a phrase generated by the flamboyantly designed Guggenheim Museum Gehry fashioned in Bilbao, Spain.
After the opening there, the museum, which is similar in style to Disney Hall, albeit in titanium, generated an avalanche of visitors who in turn melted into a flood of economic activity and income for the struggling gritty city. While by far in another league if not galaxy from Bilbao, with so much more to offer, L.A. could always use another attraction. Disney Hall certainly promises to be one.
So far the results have been mixed. The critics who have toured the building, as I have, were impressed. I loved its sculptural qualities, from a distance and in the interior, which I thought was grand yet intimate. But I had problems with how it relates to, and works with, the surrounding streets. I concluded that Gehry's forte was sculpture, not urban design.
Most critics and commentators have been more than impressed, some in sycophantic awe. "Frozen music," wrote one. "The hall is an exuberant pile of twisting steel encasing public spaces of generosity and wit," declared another. "Infinitely finer, follow up to Bilbao." And "an architectural experience of immense power and subtlety."
To a person simply loving the hall as an icon and eye-catcher, they similarly have put down or dismissed Downtown. It makes you wonder if they all drove into the bowels beneath the hall to park, rode the escalator into the lobby, and never set foot on the streets, or ever walked Downtown and enjoyed its many landmarks.
Their throwaway lines and misrepresentations do not inspire confidence in their coverage, while raising questions how much indeed the hall will boost Downtown, be it among tourists or Westsiders.
"Downtown Los Angeles is an oxymoron. And it is hardly the place which first comes to mind when we think of culture," wrote a British critic. "Los Angeles, as we know, is a city shaped by the car. The Disney Hall is designed to be understood at the speed of the freeways that hedge it in, and it sits on a huge car park that will funnel countless commuters who park here on the way to work through its lobbies."
"Downtown Los Angeles has only a handful of singular pieces of architecture - Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue's Central Library of 1926, Arata Isozaki's Museum of Contemporary Art of 1986, and Rafael Moneo's Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, finished last year - and Disney Hall is now surely the most distinguished building in the area," declared the critic for The New Yorker.
"It is, indeed, monumental," he continued, "but it isn't fair to say that it doesn't respond to its urban context, which is, more or less, like the downtowns of many other major American cities - a lot of glass skyscrapers surrounded by a lot of freeways. Disney Hall is set on Grand Avenue, a boulevard almost as wide as a freeway, and the site has a steep grade, making it even more unfriendly to pedestrians."
"It could exert a major impact on the city's feeble downtown, its contorted, lumpy profile looming impressively over the skyline," declared another sojourning commentator. "Yet, like so much in L.A., it is an architecture which looks impressive from inside a car or coming out of one of the city's nearby exclusive restaurants, but ignores the sidewalk."
Countered another out-of-town critic: "It is ironic that Gehry is being criticized for not producing a building that will transform a dreary, lifeless downtown area, since that is what he did more successfully than any other living architect when he designed the Guggenheim in Bilbao."
Let us hope that soon they will be commenting on the "L.A. effect," or better yet, the "Downtown L.A. Effect." That is if they can find it beyond the glimmering walls of the Disney Concert Hall.
Sam Hall Kaplan is an Emmy award-winning reporter for FOX 11 News and the author of L.A. Lost & Found.
(page 3, 10/20/03)
© Los Angeles Downtown News. Reprinting items retrieved from the archives are for personal use only. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission of the Los Angeles Downtown News. If you would like to re-distribute anything from the Los Angeles Downtown News Archives, please call our permissions department at (213) 481-1448.
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