Now that the Walt Disney Concert Hall has passed its acoustics tests, revealing a bright and detailed yet blended, mellow sound and a democratic reach to its 2,400 seats, it is possible to exult, without caveat or apology, in the sheer beauty of the apparition now billowing at the corner of First and Grand in downtown Los Angeles. The dependable Southern California sun ignites the stainless steel surfaces and perpetually turns with the rotating forms in multiple sunrises. The levity and grace of the sailing curves wrap the exterior in motion and enigma, elevating the already superior acoustic experience inside by a feat of synesthetic transference. In a rare interactive reciprocity, music here seems to be visualized by the flowing lines of the hall, and architecture seems music spatialized.
Disney Hall may have been built out of historic sequence--its design was begun several years before the Guggenheim Bilbao (1991-97) but finished six years after, in late 2003--yet it is culturally more significant because Disney Hall was the site of invention, the building that inaugurated Gehry's long, rich series of curvilinear structures that have repositioned the art of architecture and raised the bar of the discipline. Gehry developed the interior of Disney Hall to a far greater extent than he did the interior of the Guggenheim Bilbao. And the exterior represents a virtuoso performance of concept, process and execution.
From the street, the beauty was conspicuous for some time during construction, waves of form propelling waves of space. But the opening of the hall and a year in which to experience it have finally allowed an assessment of the building as a whole. Sobriety is difficult even after repeat visits, but eventually the goose bumps subside. Once the senses have loosened their grip nit the rational mind, the building, roughly concentric in its conception, proves to be several separate buildings plus addenda-three rings of an onion and two anecdotes. The quality of each is different--and uneven.
The sequence of spaces that leads beyond the front steps, up the escalators and stairways, to seats in a hall that somehow feels like a wide-hipped galleon under sail, can best be understood in the context of a vision whose genesis occurred decades ago. It is less a story about architecture than about art.
Frank Gehry has long associated with artists, most recently and conspicuously New York artists. But artists exerted a formative influence much earlier, in the 1960s and 1970s, in the yeasty scene in and around Venice, Calif. To Gehry, who had studied art as well as architecture at the University of Southern California, the artists were charismatic, dazzling and subversive: Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Tony Berlant, Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, Robert Graham, Larry Bell, Chuck Arnoldi, Ken Price and others, many associated with the Ferns Gallery in L.A. Most architects at the time subscribed to a professional ethos represented by the corporate culture of Wilshire Boulevard, where architects characteristically designed polished, self-contained glass canisters trimmed with chrome. Any spontaneity was rationalized away in a homogenizing convergence of systems-oriented design with its prejudice toward modular uniformity rather than difference and exception.
For Gehry, the artists in the Venice milieu "walked on water," as he said. Moses, at the Riko Mizuno Gallery, working with James Turrell as an assistant, cut an oculus through the ceiling, throwing rice dust in the air to materialize the sunlight streaming through the hole. Wheeler created innovative light paintings called "Encasements," and in late 1970, Irwin used scrims for the first time in an installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. All were consciously violating or challenging traditions of their discipline, intervening architecturally by taking their work out of the frame, off the wall, off the pedestal, into space and physical immediacy.
The artists studied the environment around them, especially the visual cacophony of Venice, whose raw materiality became a subject of their art. In his paintings, Moses interpreted chain-link fences as screens of light and accidental patterns. In a building project, he sandwiched wood studs between panes of glass; he even designed a house surfaced in corrugated metal. The artists were picking up on the everyday facts around them, making visible, through recontextualization, what was too common for the eye to register.
The sites of spontaneous architectural intervention were primarily lofts--down and out "found" spaces in the artists' neighborhoods. Bengston improvised structural riffs in his rambling complex of buildings and sheds in Venice, appropriating new types of aluminum and other materials from the aerospace industry. Larry Bell built a parallelogramlike space with leaning walls that disturbed one's sense of equilibrium. These artists were fearless, even if it meant compromising their real-estate values.
For an exile wandering in a land of architectural taboo, all this ferment added up to a critique of existing practice. Gehry began to formulate a provisional road map, although the lessons he learned from the artists were difficult to apply to his own profession, with its cautious conventions and attitudes. Nonetheless, there were artists who commissioned Gehry because they wanted the unconventional. In a Malibu house (1970-72) designed for painter Ron Davis, Gehry applied two-dimensional perspective techniques to three-dimensional space; he built an irregular trapezoid in corrugated metal, producing illusionistic effects akin to those the painter was exploring.
Gehry had come off the drafting hoard. He liberated himself from the architectural drawing, designing instead like a sculptor, or a child, producing stormy sketches of great energy. He made messy gestural models that advanced notions of formal and spatial complexity, all rendered with a rawness that was combustive. Gehry realized that buildings left unfinished were at their most powerful, and he wanted to sustain that sense all the way to the finished building. As an architect in American practice, he was alone in formulating these still embryonic thoughts. As an artist, however, he had much company, and he borrowed ideas. Gehry was breaking free, blurring boundaries, importing ideas from another discipline into his own.
Gehry's own Santa Monica house, built in 1977-78, summarizes his emerging methodology. Wrapping a modest preexisting house with corrugated sheet metal that supports spectral cubes of glass and chain-link fence rising from the roof like emanations, Gehry created a structure that is a compilation of influences gathered over his years at the sidelines of the Venice art scene. The house is basically an installation piece, but at a habitable architectural scale. An occurrence common in galleries was original in the architecture world. He insisted he was practicing architecture, not doing art, and that insistence was critical to his claim of originality.
Gehry produced variations on the idea of architecture as occupied installation in a whole generation of buildings: as with his own house, he proceed ed by composing architectural collages through an additive method. By the late 1980s, when he was invited to compete for the design of Disney Hall, collage-based installation was still Gehry's dominant design concept. But the scheme he produced reflected the inherent difficulty of applying a collagist methodology to a large-scale public building. Because of its fragmentation, juxtaposition of unlike elements and incompleteness, collage tends to be anti-monumental. A limit to growth inheres in the process and concept. His winning submission was in fact formally awkward, a stepped mass (the main building), to which he appended a large garden that looked like a greenhouse enclosed in chain link. Outbuildings took various forms--one cube sported a cupola; a second nested another cube within itself; a ziggurat supported a grove. Together they accompanied the main building uneasily.
