Design and conquer.

Frank Gehry is one of the world's most renowned architects, but that global acclaim hasn't shielded him from the slings and arrows right here in his own backyard

The first thing Frank Gehry says as he sits down for an interview is that he can't talk about Walt Disney Concert Hath the downtown project he designed and has been working on for a decade.

"They've got committees and meetings and all that," said Gehry, referring to talks among project officials on the status of his involvement in the hail's final design stages.

Gehry told project officials in early June that he was withdrawing from any future involvement. This was after word came that another architect might be brought in for the final stages of the hall's design, pushing Gehry out of the lead role to one of consultant.

A June 5 statement from the project leadership and Gehry said that all involved wanted the architect to be "an integral part of the project." Even so, Gehry has blamed fundraising delays and other problems with Disney Hall for a 10-year drought of commissions in California.

Robert Timme, the dean of the USC School of Architecture, believes Gehry has simply moved beyond the houses and smaller buildings (like the binoculars-shaped building housing ad agency TBWA/Chiat Day in Venice) that characterized his earlier work here. His new work is more along the colossal lines of the nearly completed $89 million Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

"It's been a long time since California has been spending tunney on the kind of buildings that Frank Gehry now works on," said Timme, who said Gehry is "without a doubt" the world's most renowned architect.

Question: When you accept a commission, how do you go about defining a design?

Answer: I meet with the clients and try to understand their program and their budget. We develop cost models for similar buildings and analyze the project budget in terms of the history of building in that city with comparables so that we quickly evaluate the budget and see if it's realistic. We do that before we do any design. We make context models showing the scale of the building with the existing buildings around it and we meet with the city committees that have jurisdiction over the property and discuss their anxieties, where they see the city going and so on, so we get a three-dimensional view of the problem. I do the design part myself.

Q: What sort of design issues were you looking at for the Disney Concert Hall?

A: Disney Hall grew out of the acoustical requirements of the L.A. Philharmonic. Meeting with the acoustician, with the orchestra, we evolved an interior. The shapes of the interior were double-curvature to reflect the sound in an infinite way rather than focus it. Those shapes started to look like billowing sails. I wanted the exterior to reflect the interior and we started to use the same sail shapes.

Q: When you're designing a building that is doing things like evoking billowing sails, something generally considered unconventional ...

A: Is that of value, to make it conventional?

Q: I meant this as a question, not a criticism. In your designs, are you purposefully challenging conventions, or just expressing yourself?

A: I try to live in the present. The 19th Century had decorations, in the 20th Century it seems inappropriate to mimic the 19th Century, especially since the world has changed, its politics and philosophies have changed. So how do you find a way to humanize the building? What I've tried to do is find ways to make a building accessible to people.

There are a lot of issues. For instance, a lot of people don't realize that a conductor has a sixth sense for what a space is going to sound like. A conductor can shape the space with the music. Esa-Pekka Salonen (the L.A. Philharmonic's music director) and I spent a whole day with the orchestra at (UCLA's) Royce Hall and we played with moving the orchestra around. We decided at that time that you can change the sound of an orchestra about 30 percent by the way you move the players around.

We did a model of the hall, which is on display downtown. The acoustician was able to use that to test the sound. Zubin Mehta (former music director of the Los Angeles and New York philharmonics), tested the space and he said it was going to sound wonderful. I asked, "How do you know?" And he said, "because I know."

Q: How does Disney Hall fit into downtown L.A.? Is there any intention of influencing development around it?

A: The entrance is at street level so that you can walk right in off the street instead of like the (Dorothy) Chandler (Pavilion) where you have this sort of formal staircase that takes you up to a higher level. We tried to humanize it.

The response to it from the city, we hope, is to do something special with Grand Avenue from MoCA to the (proposed future site of the St. Vibiana's) cathedral with planting, lights, paving etc. (We want to) create a kind of arts district, culminating in God, religion and blah blah blah. That would include the Chandler and the Ahmanson Theater.

Q: People who come from out of town tend to complain that they can't find a city center in Los Angeles because it's so spread out. Can this fill that role?

A: The real downtown of L.A. is linear, it's Wilshire Boulevard. It unites one of the most ethnically and economically diverse populations you could imagine. Ninety percent of the dwellings within three blocks of Wilshire Boulevard are well-manicured; from Vermont Avenue to the beach, and it's only when you get closer to downtown that it slips in quality, and that could easily be repaired.

Downtown is only going to work when they put housing down there, when the Westside people move downtown and realize that they can walk to the concert hall, to the theater, to Little Tokyo, to Chinatown, and when they realize that the transportation system down there is quite amazing.

Q: What are your thoughts on new buildings and architecture?

A: We spend a lot of time in buildings so it would be nice if there was a humanist attitude about them. But most buildings aren't, they're about money.

Q: Do you see that as changing?

A: I don't think so. There are a few developers that are interested in that like Maguire (Partners), but most people just build buildings.

Q: In an interview last year you said you were getting most of your offers from overseas.

A: Yeah, I do get a lot of work from Europe, especially Germany, where there is a strong tradition of architecture.

Q: And not so much from L.A. or California?

A: Zero from California. Nothing.

Q: Since how long?

A: Ten years.

Frank Gehry

Company: Frank O. Gehry & Associates Inc.

Position: Founder and Design Principal

Born: Toronto, 1930

Education: Bachelor of Architecture, USC

Hobbies: Playing ice hockey with his sons

Personal: Married to Berta, two sons; two daughters from a previous marriage