The Los Angeles Philharmonic, the steel ship awaiting the Orfeó Català

BarcelonaThe architect Frank O. Gehry (1929-2025) discovered classical music as a child when his mother took him to concerts in his native Toronto. As an architect, his first major concert hall was the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a steel ship that this weekend will host the Orfeó Català's US debut with a Solemn Mass Beethoven's concert hall, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. "What interested me most was giving the hall a soul and bringing people together," Gehry said about this project. "In the end, I created a kind of intimacy surrounding the orchestra, which begins to break down the traditional shape of the space." shoebox "The hall is enclosed, reducing the distance between the orchestra and the audience, bringing them closer," he explained. Gehry was convinced that comfort and good hall qualities allow the audience to better connect with the music. That's why Walt Disney Hall was inspired by Hans Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonic. Gehry's seats are arranged in concentric terraces around the stage, and the upholstery features a multicolored floral print. "Somehow, people would feel more connected. So I was thinking about the object itself, separate from the walls of the hall. This gave me much more freedom. It was like putting a ship inside a box," Gehry said.

Creative freedom often comes with great responsibility. Gehry explained that he had worked on the building "from the inside out," aiming for the best acoustics, which is why he brought on board the Japanese expert Yasuhisa Toyota. Gehry and his team conducted nearly fifty tests before arriving at the final solution. In fact, the building bears no resemblance to the competition entry with which Gehry beat out Gottfried Böhm, James Stirling, and Hans Hollein. But the project's vicissitudes also played a significant role in this. It began in 1987 when Lillian Disney, Walt Disney's widow, announced a $50 million donation to Los Angeles County for the construction of an auditorium in her husband's memory, coinciding with the Philharmonic making the city an icon. "To make these kinds of forms work, we had already been developing a technology with the French aerospace industry. So we used their software, CATIA, and over time we improved it to adapt it to architectural use. It gave me freedom, formal freedom," Gehry said.

The architectural competition was held in 1988, but the building wasn't inaugurated until 2003. By then, Gehry had already achieved worldwide acclaim with the Guggenheim Bilbao, and this fact, along with weight and budgetary considerations, led to the planned stone cladding being replaced with one made of steel sheets. This is why the Walt Disney Concert Hall has sometimes been called the "little brother" of the Basque museum. But the choice of steel, which gives the building a more gleaming appearance than titanium, had some consequences: the shine and concave surfaces turned the building into a "parabolic mirror," as described on the auditorium's website. A 2005 study revealed that the building created a microclimate with extremely high temperatures on the nearest sidewalks. Apartments in adjacent buildings heated up to 15 degrees Celsius. Traffic cones melted, and the glare was so intense that it blinded drivers. To resolve this situation, a computer program was used to detect the problematic panels and they were polished with industrial polishers so that they were not so shiny.

Works marked by an earthquake

The Walt Disney Concert Hall, set at an angle, occupies an island directly adjacent to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the auditorium where the Oscars were presented for many years. In the final design, Gehry gave it center stage at the corner of Grand Avenue and First Street. But the process of seeing the building completed was arduous: the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake halted construction and forced a redesign of the project, which increased its cost. To pressure for its resumption, more than a dozen leading architects, including Tadao Ando, ​​Richard Meier, Arata Isozaki, Peter Eisenman, Philip Johnson, Remo Koolhaas, and the husband-and-wife team of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, signed a letter published in 1997. Los Angeles Times to support him. Finally, construction resumed in 1998.

The auditorium is surrounded by many other iconic buildings: opposite is The Grand, a complex with two towers by the same Gehry, completed in 2022, which includes a luxury hotel and apartments, shops, cinemas, and, from DatalandA pioneering museum dedicated to art created with artificial intelligence, founded by the artist Refik Anadol. On the back island is The Broad, a museum by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, championed by Eli Broad, one of the philanthropists who spearheaded the construction of the auditorium. And about 500 meters away are the Museum of Contemporary Art, by Arata Isozaki, and the Cathedral of Los Angeles, designed by Rafael Moneo.