Gehry's great concerto: the Disney Concert Hall has radically transformed a block of downtown Los Angeles making it a place to visit rather than drive through.

From the first solo notes of The Star-Spangled Banner, sung by jazz vocalist Dianne Reeves in spotlight at centre stage, to the final crescendo of the entire LA Philharmonic expressing the energy and shock of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the inaugural performance at the Walt Disney Concert Hall was a calibrated workout for both music and architecture. This is a hall where music in its various iterations seems remarkably at home with an audience sometimes gathered vertiginously in the round.

For a building instantaneously acclaimed as a vanguard masterpiece, the Walt Disney Concert Hall is surprisingly traditional. True, its giant external petals of stainless-steel cladding are wonderful amid the isolated towers of Downtown. From afar, they glisten and reflect the sky, then taunt--like the cape of some ingenious sculptor/matador--and swoop away when viewed up-close. Thrilling to drive past, the Hall's cladding plays a sophisticated game of concave and convex surfaces that, unlike the mostly opaque walls of the Baroque, contain reflections of light and sky and lead the eye out to newly framed aspects of adjacent buildings. Downtown Los Angeles has never looked so good.

Being LA, concertgoers inevitably arrive by car, leaving the garage by a red escalator lobby topped by one of many fractured skylights. As with Hans Hollein's concoction, and that of Stirling and Wilford in the original competition back in 1988, Gehry's building takes advantage of its slightly raised site to play with metaphors of Greek Acropolis and German stadtkrone. (Fourth invitee Gottfried Bohm's proposal, also stadtkrone-like, was more akin to a Wagnerian gasworks.) Surrounded by heavily trafficked streets, the orthogonal site dips from an easterly corner--the formal and photogenic entry court--to the west, where a steel ribbon canopy signals entry to REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, a supplementary arts space accommodated within the parking structure as it rises above street level.

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In the 1980s, the acropolis of eclectic elements was characteristic of such playful urban works as Stirling's Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (AR December 1984), Hollein's Abteiberg Museum in Monchengladbach (AR December 1982), and Gehry's own Loyola University Law School on a flat site just west of Downtown LA. Nevertheless, Gehry's virtuosity and experimentation allowed for his inclusion, alongside a younger generation, in the New York Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition (also 1988), with its ambitions to forge a hyper-Modernist avant-garde. Seldom prone to theorizing, Gehry's office further developed in the 1990s away from shards and violent fragmentation to a volumetric architecture of dynamic surfaces engendered (as with the Bilbao Guggenheim, AR December 1997) by evolving computer technology.

Perhaps because of this long gestation period, the Walt Disney Concert Hall--in particular the auditorium and the office blocks exposed on the plinth--retains Gehry's earlier concern with a Cubistic assemblage of objects together with an emerging ability to drape space with complexly shaped membranes. Although a large public greenhouse has been lost, auditorium massing still shifts from the axial coordinates of the urban block, setting up a tension that is partially held in check by orthogonal, stone-clad office accommodation to south and west.

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In essence, Gehry sheathes a timber box in stainless steel. Dancing about this protected auditorium, the steel peels away to create entrances and windows. It also bubbles upward to shelter two extraordinary satellite rooms: a bar with curving timber sides (a hip descendant of Aalto's 1939 New York Pavilion?) and the dramatic Founders' Room, where gigantic petals of plaster are sucked upwards into a vortex of glass and steel far above. In 1988, Gehry had envisaged the auditorium as a stacked stone ziggurat. Intervening years and budgets entailed the switch to metal, but the Founders' Room--part stupa, part air sock--retains a formal independence through its unique shape and through the selection of a shinier external steel panel.

The new building spills out and mutates into various intriguing shapes onto Grand Avenue, within easy strolling distance of Arata Isozaki's Museum of Contemporary Art. To the west, the city streets dip down to expose largely impenetrable walls, save for the REDCAT corner entrance, to the parking structure (these immediate streets function primarily as feeder arteries to the LA freeway system). Above, however, Gehry has created a whimsical public garden, terraces with eccentric planting and paving and a small, hooded amphitheatre that take advantage (like Rafael Moneo's parvis to his cathedral a few blocks to the north, AR March 2003) of LA's surprising topological richness.

At intermission or just before a performance, the audience can happily colonize both these raised gardens and the concatenation of lift shafts, open staircases, and stacked decks threaded through the residual spaces located between auditorium and outermost shell. In principle, each landing or access corridor becomes a viewing terrace, augmenting the excitement of a special evening out. These entrails reveal Gehry's empirical ability, or perhaps his seemingly casual Californian stance, in the resolution of complex practical and spatial issues. Nevertheless, during inauguration festivities, some first-time visitors to the Concert Hall had difficulty orientating themselves through these interstitial zones.

As at Hans Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonie, this flow of circulation towards the primary performance space is deliberately a performance in itself: exposed, mobile, and interactive. Gehry's original intention for many balconies fanning out from the stage, again kin to Scharoun's metaphor of vineyard terraces at the Philharmonie, has been curtailed as acoustic and other realities have been integrated into his design. The auditorium, as built, is closer to the rectilinear box of Vienna's historic Musikverein or Amsterdam's Concertgebouw. Its flanks are essentially twin flat surfaces, but surfaces with projections and perforated to allow access in many different locations.

The interior is lined or draped in timber, mostly Douglas fir, evoking further allusions or similes: ambitions for the auditorium to feel like a nautical vessel and be like a musical instrument itself. The 2265 seats are distributed symmetrically, mostly across a raked or chestra area in front of the stage or on a pincer-shaped balcony above. Yet a significant number occupy bow-fronted stalls to either side of the stage; skinny concave balconies projecting from three levels above; or tiered terraces behind the stage that part to either side of a 6125-pipe organ. With pipes stylized by Gehry to appear like rods on the verge of fission, this organ may well be a contemporary counterpart to some Baroque monstrance or mural of ascending angels.

This Baroque sensibility is not merely emotional or 'artistic'. The building lies directly across First Street from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (completed by Welton Becket and Associates in 1964) whose convex if imperious sides set up a curvilinear momentum in the immediate context. In Gehry's foyer areas, visitors seem naturally to navigate about the timbered hull of the auditorium, and towards natural light as it filters past sections of ceiling and the swoosh of balustrades--both plastered white to read as comparatively subsidiary elements. Columns are also theatrical, timber-clad like the auditorium, but bursting apart into gigantic stems or branches that house uplights.

The organic theme continues inside where all seats are upholstered in a vividly patterned and coloured fabric, a floral abstraction that Gehry designed in tribute to the late Lillian Disney, widow of Walt Disney and donor of the initial $50 million gift to a then-hypothetical project in 1987. Surprisingly decorative or Pop, these seats must perform to the same acoustic standards whether occupied or not. Working with acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, the Gehry team constructed tenth-scale models of the hall to test sound performance. Above audience and performers alike, an inner ceiling droops downwards in sail-like sleeves that both help disperse sound and secrete necessary technical apparatus. The timber sheathing of the interior--stage floor, balustrades, perimeter walls, billowing soffit--contributes greatly to the remarkable intimacy of the Walt Disney auditorium. The LA Philharmonic knows it must attract a new and younger following; and Gehry's architecture, or the building achieved by Gehry's team, deliberately eschews the formal, hierarchical ethos of most previous buildings of the type.

Behind the musicians, when they assume their orthodox semi-circular formation, light seeps in to either side of the organ and the ceiling clearly floats free of rear internal walls. During the splendid inaugural concert, as a lone trumpeter performed Charles lves's The Unanswered Question from the centre of the uppermost terrace farthest away from conductor and orchestra, a screen or blind ascended behind to allow views out (through another crystalline window) to the blue night sky, connecting music lovers in the belly of the auditorium with the cosmos outside. This is Los Angeles, after all, the city in which dream and reality are most conspicuously mixed.

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