Walt Disney Concert Hall — theatre building
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Walt Disney Concert Hall

  • 2 min read
  • 34.055° N 118.250° W

Interesting facts

  • Gehry recalled being told early on that Walt Disney's name would never go on a building he designed, yet his scheme won over Lillian Disney.
  • The finished hall cost an estimated 274 million dollars, of which 110 million went on the county-funded car park beneath it.
  • The Disney family's contribution came to an estimated 84.5 million dollars, with another 25 million from The Walt Disney Company.
  • Gehry has said the clients turned down his stone cladding because, after seeing his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, they wanted metal.
  • Sunlight concentrated by the concave, polished Founders Room panels created hot spots on nearby pavements reported at up to about 60 °C.
  • In early rehearsals the hall revealed such detail that the orchestra discovered wrong notes in printed Ravel parts it had used for decades.
  • The reverberation time is about 2.2 seconds when the hall is empty and around 2.0 seconds when it is full.
  • The organ has 6,125 pipes and 72 stops; its longest pipe is 32 feet long and sounds a note of just 16 hertz.
  • According to the organ designer Manuel Rosales, some of Gehry's early ideas would have put the console at the top and the pipes upside down.
  • The organ was a gift from Toyota Motor Sales USA, and a movable console lets it be played from any of four points on stage.

Why it is worth it

Sheets of brushed stainless steel curl and billow above Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles like sails caught in a gust. Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, opened on 23 October 2003, is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Its tilted, curving surfaces – the box columns on the north side lean forward at 17 degrees – were meant, in Gehry's words, to evoke musical movement and the motion of the city, and their geometry was so complex that it was worked out with CATIA, software developed for designing French fighter jets.

The project began in 1987 with a gift of 50 million dollars from Lillian Disney, Walt Disney's widow, as a tribute to her husband's love of the arts and of Los Angeles. Gehry finished the design in 1991, but fundraising stalled and the hall rose only after construction resumed in 1999. Cost-cutting replaced the stone skin Gehry had first intended with metal – he later said that stone would have glowed at night. One section clad in mirror-polished panels focused sunlight onto neighbouring flats and pavements so intensely that in 2005 the panels were sanded to a matte finish.

Inside, the auditorium seats 2,265 people around the orchestra in a design that blends the "vineyard" terraces of Hans Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonie with the classic shoebox of halls such as Vienna's Musikverein. Walls and ceiling are lined with Douglas fir and the floor with oak; the acoustics, by Minoru Nagata with his protégé Yasuhisa Toyota, were tested on a one-tenth-scale model and won wide praise when the hall opened. Above the stage, the organ completed in 2004 bursts out of the wall in a sheaf of curved wooden pipes – a façade Gehry developed with the organ designer Manuel Rosales, built by Caspar Glatter-Götz.

Getting there

The hall stands at 111 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, on Bunker Hill. Metro's Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill station (lines A and E) and Civic Center/Grand Park station (lines B and D) are nearby. The nearest airport is Hawthorne Municipal Airport (HHR), about 17 km away; Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) lies about 29 km to the southwest.

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in California 36The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful Buildings in the United States 34The Most Beautiful Theatres 35The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, California, is the fourth hall of the Los Angeles Music Center and was designed by Frank Gehry. It was opened on October 23, 2003. Bounded by Hope Street, Grand Avenue, and 1st and 2nd streets, it seats 2,265 people and serves, among other purposes, as the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. The hall is a compromise between a vineyard-style seating configuration, like the Berliner Philharmonie by Hans Scharoun, and a classical shoebox design like the Vienna Musikverein or the Boston Symphony Hall.

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34.05528, -118.25000per Wikidata