Several months earlier Gehry got so anxious about how the place would sound that he called Salonen at home one evening and asked to meet him at the unfinished hall right away. (Gehry worked closely with the Japanese acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, who also collaborated with him on the much-praised concert hall at Bard College in New York, which opened this spring.) Salonen asked the concertmaster to come with his violin, and the man played a little Bach for them in the dim and dusty hall. There were tears that night, too. “It already sounded beautiful. We were quite shaken,” Salonen recalls. “This project is emotionally huge for Frank for many reasons–the history of it, that it’s his hometown, that it’s music.”
Disney Hall will finally open this fall–16 tortured years after the late Lillian Disney, Walt’s widow, instigated the project with a $50 million gift. The ultimate verdict on its acoustics will come from music critics after the gala first concert on Oct. 23. But if the building does sound as good as it looks–and early reports are enthusiastic–it will be a masterpiece, even greater than the spectacular Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which made Gehry an international star in 1997. Both buildings are sheathed mainly in metal (Bilbao in titanium, not steel) and employ Gehry’s unique architectural language, but they’re significantly different in mood and design. Where the Guggenheim lazes along a riverfront, Disney is tighter, more explosive, more urban. The one beef about Bilbao has been that it can overpower the art inside it. At Disney, the glorious architecture will be married to music, and each is destined to enrich the other.
The camera loves Disney Hall, with its sexy curves and glamorous skin, rosy and golden at dusk, silvery at high noon. Rising at the crest of Bunker Hill in downtown L.A., across from the dowdy Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the philharmonic’s former home, it jubilantly unfurls its fanciful forms against the mundane skyline as if to say “Here I am!” Gehry’s good at making his architecture friendly and streetwise: along one side of the site, a cafe and bookshop will meet the sidewalk, and the grand outdoor staircase is meant to be a big front porch where people can sit and schmooze.
Gehry, a weekend sailor, speaks of the design in nautical terms. “Wing on wing”–when the wind’s at your back and the mainsail and jib are spread–is how he describes the shapes flanking that stair. And he extends the metaphor to the interior of the hall–“a magical barge,” he calls it–that seems to float inside its silver gift-wrapping. It’s a fantastic cocoon of honey-colored Douglas fir, with a ceiling of billowing wood, partly open across its “stern” so daylight seeps in–across the surprisingly flowered upholstery on the seats. (“I promised Mrs. Disney I’d do floral.”) As a focus, Gehry designed an organ that looks like a grove of trees swaying in the breeze.
Yet for a long time, Disney Hall seemed to be cursed. (Take the name: the family had to apply to the Disney company for permission to use it.) When he won the design competition in 1988, Gehry was a maverick L.A. architect who liked to juxtapose cheap materials in vibrant, raucous, completely original ways, most notoriously in his own Santa Monica house, with its jutting chunks of plywood and corrugated metal panels. He’d never worked in the elegant limestone originally stipulated for the hall. After he got the commission, a ballooning budget, fund-raising problems and internal –politics threatened to swamp the project. (Once estimated at $100 million, the hall ended up costing $274 million.) Gehry had to rework the design again and again (well before he conceived Bilbao, by the way)–a process that made it ever more fluid and assured. Construction began, then was stopped for five years. In 1997, faced with losing control over the details of the design, Gehry nearly quit. But Diane Disney Miller, Lillian’s daughter, backed him, using the last $14 million of her mother’s gift as leverage against the philharmonic’s building committee. “Anyway,” Gehry now says with a sigh, “it got built, and that’s a miracle.”
He’s sitting in the booth of a favorite–and totally unfashionable–dinerlike restaurant in Santa Monica, jet-lagged and weary. Though he’s 74, Gehry shows no inclination to slow down. He works out, and he’s an inveterate dieter. After cheating with fried calamari, he orders skinless chicken and iceberg lettuce spritzed with lemon juice. (“Hey, don’t stop,” he tells the waiter wielding the pepper mill. “That’s all I got goin’ here.”) Once he settles in, he talks excitedly about far-flung new projects–one in an old arts district of Lisbon, maybe a town hall in Taiwan. Meanwhile, several designs are under construction closer to home–from a building at MIT to a small museum in Biloxi, Miss.
Gehry is rumpled, unpretentious, down to earth. At one point, he claims he’s having trouble with “this fame s—”–which is about to ratchet up several more notches. (Recently, his firm entered a competition in France for what’s billed as a “Frank Gehry-like” museum. Guess who didn’t make the cut?) But like his seemingly free-form yet subtly rigorous buildings, Gehry harbors a fierce discipline and perfectionism beneath his casual demeanor. He designs by “trusting my intuition,” but exhaustively re-works each scheme using cardboard or wooden models. “What interests me,” he says, “is that you can be a control freak and still deliver the passion.” He runs his office–with a staff of 120 architects–as “a tight ship.” He mentions that he loves an esoteric form of Japanese court music that he describes as “controlled chaos.”
That’s his life. After decades in Santa Monica, he’s just moved his whole office south to Marina del Rey. He and his partners are launching Gehry Technologies, a company that will sell the computer program they developed to generate the precise building specifications for his irregular forms. (Neither Bilbao nor Disney could have been constructed without it–though Gehry himself never uses a computer.) He’s developing a line of Gehry-brand lamps, wristwatches and vodka bottles. He’s even planning to leave his famous house and build a new one, nearer the office and his sailboat, for himself and his wife, Berta, who quietly helps run his tight ship.
But with all he’s got going on, Disney Hall is a defining masterwork–because of his love for music, for Los Angeles and for his art. Its roller-coaster swoops and gleaming curves seem to mirror his formidable energies and ambitions. And as he grows older, his work takes on a new urgency. “Because we’re getting close to the final chapter, I just want to do all that stuff,” he says. Last year his close friend Jay Chiat, the advertising guru, died of cancer while Gehry was away on a trip. “I got home and found this message from Jay on the answering machine,” he explains. “He said, ‘I’m calling to say goodbye, and to tell you how important you’ve been in my life.’ And then he said, ‘You know, don’t wait–do stuff. Do what you want to do’.” As Disney Hall shows, nobody does it better.
