Thomas F. Reese and Carol McMichael Reese. "Böhm, Gehry, Hollein, and
Stirling in Los Angeles: The Competition Entries for the Walt Disney
Concert Hall," Zodiac 2 (September 1989): 157-222 (version submitted to
editors).
Böhm, Gehry, Hollein, and Stirling in Los Angeles: the Competition Entries for
The Walt Disney Concert Hall
Carol McMichael Reese
and
Thomas Ford Reese
On May 12, 1987, Lillian B. Disney and The Lillian B. Disney Foundation
announced the gift of fifty million dollars to the Music Center of Los Angeles
County for the purpose of building a concert hall to honor her late husband, Walt
Disney. Mrs. Disney's outstanding gift to the people of Los Angeles--the largest
single gift in the city's history--was admirably rewarded on November 11, 1988,
by the entries to a limited architectural competition of Gottfried Böhm of Cologne,
Frank Gehry of Los Angeles, Hans Hollein of Vienna, and James Stirling and
Michael Wilford of London, the first four of whom are now Pritzker Prize
recipients.
Invitational architectural competitions are often invoked when a building
project is of such artistic, social, and political importance that its commissioners
are anxious to gather a broad range of ideas about its solution from practitioners
whose work they admire. The competition process serves as an educational
opportunity for patrons because, as judges, they must weigh the relative merits
and drawbacks of each proposed scheme; the competition calls into play, as well
as into question, their presuppositions, tastes, alignments, and aspirations.
Since dialogue between patrons and architects is limited during a competition by
its regulations, most significant communication must be suppressed until the
submission of final designs. But the Disney Hall competition included a mid-term
concept review (September 19-22,1988), so the competitors and building
committee members were allowed four-hour mediation sessions during which
they could tune their instruments and test the political currents in anticipation of
final strategies. In this crucial moment, the clients could see analogous partis
developing among the participants as well as wildly divergent solutions, and the
clients' learning process began. As they met with one architect after another to
ask and answer questions, they not only voiced their prejudices, they also
became third-party connections among the competitors, so that the architectural
conversation was widened, even if in an indirect way.
On December 12, 1988, the Walt Disney Concert Hall Committee named
Frank Gehry the winner, but their premiation of his design did not mean, of
course, that the project's solution had been found. It meant that they agreed that
Gehry best met the criteria of assessment, which were stated explicitly in the
commission's regulations: (1) "ability to capture the spirit and intent of the Walt
Disney Concert Hall," (2) "understanding and interpretation of the design
program," (3) "understanding of the relationship of the Walt Disney Concert Hall
to the Music Center," and (4) "understanding of the Walt Disney Concert Hall as
a 'building block' of the city." And after the final judgment, the dialogue among
various constituents and the winner about what definitive form the building should
take began in earnest, but the echoes of the losers' voices remained in the
commentary represented by their drawings and models. Any future thought
about the Walt Disney Concert Hall will take into account their contributions.
Program
The Walt Disney Concert Hall is a complex project with many
constituencies who expect it to fulfill their dreams, some of which may prove
impossible. According to the commission's published project statement, the
donor desired that the hall "be a building of architectural splendor, a beautiful and
elegant building . . . [to] honor and reflect . . . the Walt Disney spirit of creativity,
inspiration, and humanism." When Mrs. Disney and the recipients of her gift, the
Music Center of Los Angeles County, determined that the new hall would be the
permanent home of Los Angeles's world-renowned Philharmonic Orchestra
(founded in 1919 but until now without a hall of its own), they asked that the
building "provide the best acoustical environment in which to hear symphonic
music . . . [and] become one of the world's greatest concert halls . . . [and] a vital
addition to the tradition of excellence that has made the Music Center of Los
Angeles County one of the major performing arts venues of the world." Finally,
the County of Los Angeles, who owns the land on which the new hall will be built,
as well as the adjacent cultural properties now managed by the Music Center
Operating Company (including the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Mark Taper
Forum, and the Ahmanson Theater), requested that Disney Hall "be both a
catalyst and an anchor to a quickly emerging urban core, . . . [an] urban link that
will unite . . . the financial and civic centers, establishing a culturally integrated
focus to Los Angeles." While Mrs. Disney and her representatives, the Music
Center, the Philharmonic Orchestra, and Los Angeles County share common
goals for Disney Hall, each constituency has its own priorities. And the creation
of the building is further complicated by the involvement of the city of Los
Angeles, the Community Redevelopment Agency (a wealthy forty-year-old quasimunicipal agency funded by tax allocations), and various private developers who
have their own ambitions for this critical project.
Care must be taken that Disney Hall does not become the proverbial broth
spoiled by too many cooks, but the site on which it will rise is also characterized
by conflicts of interest and image. The Music Center complex, which Disney Hall
will extend to the south, lies on Bunker Hill, a prominent hill in a strategic corner
of downtown Los Angeles. Freeways that were built in the early 1950s on the
west (the Harbor) and north (the Hollywood) of Bunker Hill, as well as the gridlinkages through downtown that they demanded, made a virtual island of this
promontory. Already a degenerate area of late nineteenth-century Victorian
houses and early twentieth-century commercial buildings, Bunker Hill died of
strangulation in the mid 1950s. Los Angeles's twenty-acre civic mall climbed up
to the peak of Bunker Hill on the east but had no real vigor of its own to breathe
life back into the area. Planners and politicians agreed that it would be best to
raze Bunker Hill's twenty-five square blocks and build anew, and the first joint
private-public project to take shape there was the Music Center. Inspired by the
vision of Philharmonic advocate Dorothy Buffum Chandler and built according to
the designs of Los Angeles architect Welton Beckett, the arts complex took
shape between 1964 and 1969 and grew to contain three performance spaces:
the ellipsoidal Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (which the Philharmonic shares with the
Los Angeles Music Center Opera), the cylindrical Mark Taper Forum, and the
cubical Ahmanson Theater. According to statistics prepared in 1987, each of the
Music Center's 5,756 seats is used 235 times yearly, an occupancy rate which is
23% ahead of that of Lincoln Center. Locally, the Music Center is credited not
only with revitalizing Bunker Hill, but also with initiating the resurgence of the
city's downtown, which some historians and critics have claimed (mistakenly)
never existed.
The new Disney Hall returns the Music Center to center stage as a
principal player in the drama of redeveloping urban Los Angeles. At its most
basic level, the commission program specified that the competition participants
should design a twenty-five hundred seat concert hall; a one-thousand seat
chamber music hall; attendant public foyers, reception halls, bars, cafes, practice
and storage rooms, and a gift shop; and a maximum of fifty-five thousand square
feet of office space for the Philharmonic Orchestra, in particular, and the Music
Center, in general. The commission's project statement makes clear that the
competitors' solutions "should convey a unifying theme . . . [and] compliment the
existing Music Center." But the challenge did not stop there. Two bulldozed,
unreclaimed properties (which function as desolate parking lots) lie adjacent to
the Disney Hall site to the east along First Street, while Los Angeles's newest
downtown cultural facility--Arata Isozaki's Museum of Contemporary Art--peeks
out from the receding slope of Bunker Hill one and one-half blocks to the south
on Grand Avenue. Thus, in order to "strongly influence the quality of design and
construction of adjacent projects . . . [and to] "create a major cultural corridor on
Grand Avenue," the Walt Disney Concert Hall Committee charged the
competitors with the design of a master plan that included all three of the
county's First Street properties. The first--the Disney Hall site--lay west of Grand;
the second lay east of Grand; and the third lay further east across Olive Street.
The latter parcels were to be densely developed with high- and low-rise
buildings, containing a maximum of almost two million four hundred thousand
square feet of retail and office space. Underscoring and, indeed, investing in
their vision of the soon-to-be-enlarged Music Center as the culmination of the
city's public space, the committee provided the participants with a 1:50 scale site
model on which to insert their submission models and decreed that two of the
eight required submission panels be devoted to overall site considerations.
Obliged, then, to make large gestures which would transform a financially,
politically, and culturally sensitive area of the city, Böhm, Gehry, Hollein, and
Stirling were judged not only on their proposed Disney Halls but on their visions
of an enhanced Bunker Hill. The four projects represented clear alternatives in
parti, contextual expression, and image, and a comparison serves as an
introduction to the approaches taken by each architect and those favored by the
clients.
Parti
With respect to parti, the participants divided along ideological lines in
their conception and treatment of the hall's foyers, and these ideological
decisions were strategic factors in the competition. Hollein and Stirling created
dramatic sculptural volumes to express the functional units of the program-Stirling with calm and balanced geometries and Hollein with a multiplicity of
contrasted forms--in which the foyers were servant spaces. But they projected
largely elite private realms for concertgoers. Böhm and Gehry, however, added
a new element requested only indirectly by the program: a major enclosed
volume of public space that not only provided access and amenities to
concertgoers, but also invited all passersby to explore and discover this new
public realm. Böhm created a populist public space that overwhelmed the image
(and probably the budget) of the concert hall. But Gehry's brilliant doublefunctioning foyer, which found independent expression as one of three principal
elements in his parti, achieved the perfect balance between its function as
passage and place and its character, which was at once elegant and accessible
to all.
Böhm's, Stirling's, and Gehry's compositions were highly unified. Böhm's
was a gigantic singular form inspired by exposition pavilions overlain with tones
of technological romanticism. Stirling's was a tripartite and hierarchical
"classicizing" composition based on the elegant simplicity of contrasted
geometric volumes. And Gehry's was a "baroque" and perhaps "Spanish"
composition of church, atrium, and open-chapel, in which the concert and
chamber halls serve as functionally expressive and legible sculptural anchors for
the tent like structure that creates the public sphere. Again, Hollein's entry stood
apart, for he chose to express the complexity of the many programmatic parts,
clustering the elements into a tensely massed assemblage, in which each
practically bursts with its own dynamic energy and the saturated density of its
material splendor.
Site
With respect to issues of contextualism, Böhm and Stirling locked their
schemes onto new perpendicular axes through the tabula rasa of soon-to-becommercially-developed Grand Avenue. Böhm gestured almost exclusively
toward his own proposed composition for the commercial development of those
sites, while Stirling played equally to the new axis and--through a U-shaped
"villa"--to the high-rise residential properties on the south.
Böhm and Stirling paid little attention within their designs to the Chandler
Pavilion as a companion. Böhm projected a structure so different in its scale and
form from every other in the urban landscape that there was little logic in asking
that it relate to anything not of his making. Stirling, on the other hand,
acknowledged the Chandler Pavilion in two ways, albeit offhandedly. First, in his
large cut-away model (1:16), he projected a strong image of three small, distinct,
and beautifully distributed geometric masses on First Street that seem to defer to
the larger and older partner. And second, he turned the periscope like mass of
the rooftop restaurant above the concert hall to acknowledge the important
pedestrian traffic at the corner of Grand and First streets. The site model,
elevations, and perspectives reveal, however, that Stirling intended a significant
change of mood on the Disney Hall side of First Street. Illuminated kiosks--one a
marquee over a gift shop and the other a bar at the upper terrace level--marked
the corners of Grand and Hope streets and flanked a shed-roofed box office and
cinema. Thus, the aloof and serene Chandler Pavilion actually would have faced
a busy zone interpreted as a commercial "strip." Although both Böhm's and
Stirling's works could live in some form of harmony within the surrounding
landscape, neither really chose to speak to or reflect specific extant buildings.
Hollein and Gehry created much more complicated relational orders with
what was around their Disney Halls, namely the Chandler Pavilion to the north
and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) to the southeast. Both architects
displaced the mass of the hall to the southeast corner of the site, where it was a
transition to the high-rises on the south. And they chose to make their primary
connections to extant rather than imagined architectural and urban environments.
They disposed the concert halls on a diagonal axis that began at MOCA (and
addressed north-bound traffic on Grand Avenue), gestured through the concert
hall and across the site to the northwest, and then turned dramatically to the
north in a spine that linked the new halls to the Chandler Pavilion. They reduced
the scale of the masses on First Street to create shapes or screens that would
reflect the temple like mass of the Chandler Pavilion across the street. Gehry
answered the programmatic plea for links to the Chandler and Grand with a
pedestrian bridge at the corner of First and Grand streets, which led to a small
glazed kiosk that contained the gift shop and both established the intersection
and gestured once again to the Chandler Pavilion. Gehry further accomplished a
connection between the Chandler and Disney halls on First Street by placing the
Chamber Hall here; indeed, he was the only competitor to place the smaller hall
on the northern edge of the site between the larger halls, where it joined the
parade of Music Center auditoriums from the Ahmanson to the Disney. Both
Gehry and Hollein allowed Hope Street to be the rear side of the site and to
respond with bold masses to the speed of automobile. Hollein`s western
elevation took the dramatic form of a medieval city wall with pedestrian ramparts,
while Gehry's simple horizontal platform with a raised garden to the north and an
office block to the south preferred vegetation to buildings.
Image
The primary imagery was the most essential strategic component in the
competition because it had to resonate for all constituencies. Fatal offenses to
any group--including the accountants--had to be avoided at all costs. The idea
would have to be greater than any of its parts. As the brief intoned: "The Walt
Disney Concert Hall will be the last important public building to be designed and
constructed in downtown Los Angeles within this century, influencing all other
contiguous projects in the area. The Walt Disney Concert Hall will become a
cultural keystone. . . ." What was the right image for Los Angeles? Each
architect took a distinct path. Böhm chose the image of a festival pavilion;
Stirling and Wilford, of a temple precinct; Hollein, of a miniature city; and Gehry,
of a garden conservatory. Each was fraught with implications that permeated the
entire project.
Böhm's design was at once the most conservative and the most radical
solution--one that shared some resemblances with the romantic symbolic
landmarks of Disney's popular theme parks, in which the Magic Castle or the
Matterhorn serve as a vital unifying anchors to the realms of adventure, history,
fantasy, and science fiction that cluster around them. Böhm's dominant imagery,
however, was that of a gigantic festival pavilion erected in the cleared fields at
the edge of downtown, which would embrace the urban populace and draw them
to grand concerts. Filled to overflowing in Böhm's impressionistic sketches of its
interior, the hall resembled nothing so much as nineteenth-century illustrations of
Paxton's Crystal Palace during the popular Handel Festivals held there after
1854. The gigantic dome would have been splendidly different from everything
around it--the ultimate observation platform, which offered an image that
reconciled Los Angeles's romantic search for historical roots with its distinct
fascination for futurist visions. It would have been a Crystal Palace and Eiffel
Tower for Los Angeles--a monumental technological phantasm whose exposed
structure and Piranesian stairs and bridges would have compelled exploration
and pilgrimages to high vantage points.
There were also risks in this image. Was it a pro-urban set piece or an
anti-urban Wrightian retreat in the spirit of John Lautner's Chemosphere house?
And what concrete associations might it evoke in America? Pleasure pavilions
for escape and recreation, of course, but also more ubiquitous images of retail
commerce (exchanges, market halls, and today the atrium-hotels of John
Portman or the Piranesian spaces of too many American shopping malls).
Böhm's own interpretation of the "cupola" in his competition narrative and
drawings had spiritual and cosmic overtones; it was to become a "universe of
music and creativity filled with life." Those same overtones were perhaps
indexed in the graphic style of his presentation perspectives, which he rendered
in the sketchy and luminous insubstantiality of charcoal. Nor did Böhm's models
and hardline drawings make it easy to envision the dome as built structure,
especially in the light of discrepancies between his abstract method of
presentation and the more precise forms and institutional materials that he has
used in recent similar projects and that, in fact, he described for Disney Hall. But
if the spiritual overtones and the sketchy presentation were strong elements of
risk, so too was the decision--given the composition of the committee--to elevate
the public domain to a dominance that dwarfed the music halls.
Stirling's and Wilford's image of the temple precinct was the most timeless
and universal--a balanced spatial play of a singular temple like structure,
disposed on an elevated platform with columnar screens that frame the
spotlighted activities of concertgoers in the glass-enclosed foyers. Such an
image has been frequently invoked in recent American designs for performing art
centers like New York's Lincoln Center or Los Angeles's own Music Center. For
Disney Hall, Stirling created a reposeful and exquisitely detailed composition of
masterfully disposed geometric forms that were similar to those used in his parti
for the Stuttgart Museum--cylinder, U-shaped element, and intermediary
pavilions--itself derived from Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin. One imagines
that Stirling's Disney Hall might have provoked the same criticism of scale and
context that has surrounded the reception of many of his more "neoclassic"
works executed after 1969, which explore paths suggested by the late
monumental geometries of Kahn. The design demonstrated few concerns about
the specific qualities that such a monument should have in the particular setting
of Los Angeles, even though the program requested that attention be given to
place. Stirling's entry, perhaps more than any other, gave the clients an
unequivocal choice; they could select the architect on the basis of his style and
intelligence, which was brilliantly concentrated in the concert hall, and overlook
his relative unresponsiveness to the functional detail of the program. But he also
offered a solution that may have been interpreted as elite. To some, his splendid
temple may have appeared as a backdrop for the exclusive rituals of the
privileged classes.
Hollein's image was that of a miniature city, echoing qualities in Isozaki's
nearby architectural bonsai for MOCA. But unlike the stillness of Isozaki's
composition, Hollein's contrasted masses clustered on the block like a battery of
artillery posed for a fireworks display. By contrast with Stirling's monumental and
unified composition, Hollein multiplied the number and manipulated the scale of
the parts to create a more seductive environment for pedestrians. The reduced
scale and compressed massing of Hollein's entry had links--probably indirect--to
the very best design practices of the creators of Disney World. Unlike the
facades of Adventureland or Tomorrowland, however, Hollein's Disney Hall had
to coexist with the reality around it. Its carefully scaled and exuberantly massed
volumes were freighted by the program's demands that it be both landmark and
keystone for downtown Los Angeles.
Hollein's was a learned composition filled with a myriad of symbolic and
material references to Los Angeles's architecture of the 1930s and 1940s, which
were accomplished with admirable subtlety on Grand Avenue and more
grandiloquently on First and Hope streets. His overall exterior palette
acknowledged Isozaki's MOCA in the choice of white marble, green quartzite,
and red sandstone. But his color scheme and surface textures had metaphoric
qualities as well: "part [ly] a Bronzino palette [with] some oriental splendor, some
desert notion, but also reflections of Los Angeles under the sun." Metallic tones
of polished brass, varnished bronze, gold leaf, and gilded aluminum were
important accents, and "silvery hues appear[ed] at various instances [to] give
depth to the surface." Indeed, the western elevations on Hope Street
emphasized aluminum and gilded surfaces to reflect the light of the setting sun.
But these facades also continued the architectural conversation with MOCA,
notably in the distribution of the red sandstone--crowned by a Rossiesque
colonnade. The eastern elevations along Grand Avenue were dominated by cool
grays, greens, and whites. The green hues revived the palette favored in many
of the great 1930s Deco buildings in Los Angeles (the Eastern Columbia and
Wiltern Theater). In a similar manner, at the corner of Grand and Second streets
and along Hope Street, Hollein sandwiched cylinders between contrasting
shapes in a compositional move that seems based on Los Angeles's streamlined
commercial buildings of the 1930s and 1940s (the Owl Drug Company, May
Company, and Academy Theater). And in his use of aluminum louver elements,
he even embraced Neutra's late commercial vocabulary of the 1950s and 1960s
(the Northwestern Mutual, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and Los
Angeles County Hall of Records). If the qualities of Los Angeles's Deco and
Moderne commercial architecture had romantic attraction for the Viennese
architect, they were perhaps too mundane and "too close to home" for those who
judged the competition.
The miniaturization strategy, as well as the decision to make every facade
speak in a different voice, ran the risk of making the building appear too
polyphonic and hypersaturated. The result of such complexity in shape, scale,
materials, textures, and imagery was to produce a wonderfully exotic island
micro-city, but it was perhaps too self-possessed and overwhelming. Further,
Hollein's entry may have faced an uphill battle with Los Angeles clients because
of its crowding of the block. Jostling outward toward every edge of the site from
the dynamic nucleus of the concert hall, Hollein's building taps the vigorous
energy that is present in Los Angeles today. But an influx of capital and
immigrants has brought crowding and crime that Los Angelinos would rather do
without. And Hollein's building might be seen as a fearful dream-state evocation
of their most paranoid reactions to change. Its chic details and luxuriant surfaces
are seductive but not soothing, especially in the face of frighteningly rapid
change.
Gehry's concepts of the "garden conservatory" and "plaza" were brilliant
and unique inversions: "In sympathy with the program, the vision blossomed into
a garden oasis nestled among a forest of soaring new office and residential
towers." With this swift conceptual move, he established the idea of a garden as
a primary element. The foyer became a conservatory, and Grand Avenue was
transformed into an arboretum: "At the very center of the Walt Disney Concert
Hall composition is the Foyer structure. . . . A great glass conservatory set
among gardens of native California flora, this public space opens its great glass
doors to receive the City beyond." What Gehry certainly understood, and the
others perhaps did not, is the importance of the garden in Los Angeles, which
gives topographical variety to the largely barren plains and hills. He thus
incorporated elements that have enjoyed success in Los Angeles's residential
districts and applied them to the commercial and public spheres. His foyer
became the "living room for the city . . . [which] would provide views beyond to
the plaza, the gardens, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and the City beyond. . . .
With the addition of a beautiful Morton Bay fig tree inside the Foyer, and flora
seen beyond in the gardens, nature becomes the theme of this space." And
other gardens enveloped Disney Hall: the Grand Reception Hall Garden to the
west, the hidden Musicians' Garden to the southwest, and the Chamber Hall
Garden to the north, all filled with coral and California pepper trees, birds-ofparadise, Matilija poppies, and bougainvilleas.
A companion article by Kurt Forster richly elaborates upon the imagery
and significance of Gehry's Disney Hall design, so little needs to be said here,
except to underscore the fact that Gehry's forms evoke multiple associations that
range from mimetic images, to playscapes, to the industrial vernacular of Los
Angeles. These qualities of Gehry's architecture were all orchestrated in his
public conservatory where "a forest of great columns" spread their branches with
the wonder and technological directness of Aalto's splendid roof braces at
Saynatsalo. Gehry's design could coexist with the most noble of monuments or
the most desolate parking lots. The two music halls and intermediate foyer held
everything in balance. Wrapped in gardens and radiating its imagery across the
plaza and streets in ever-larger paved waves of French limestone, Gehry's was a
composition that embraced many different idioms and allowed both familiar and
exotic shapes and structures to live an invigorated existence.
The Concert Hall
A profound dilemma confronts any architect responding to a program brief
that calls for a concert hall that must not only represent "universal principles
expressed in fresh aesthetic language" but also be an "instrument of sound."
There was an inherent paradox in the charge to design a "unique building . . . of
great inspiration" and the stipulation that "the acoustical concept . . . will generate
the parameters of the building configuration." What weight should be given to
each demand? Two obvious strategies were possible in the short time span of
the competition: (1) to focus primary attention on the large concert hall that
formed the nucleus of the commission or (2) to concentrate on the more
encompassing issues of parti, context, image, and functional requirements of the
program, while allowing the concert hall to take a more generalized form. The
second alternative was chancy, but it recognized that the real design of the hall
would occur only after the competition, when the clients would appoint an
acoustician to the design team. Stirling and Hollein appear not only to have
chosen the first alternative but also to have taken high risks in the architectureversus-acoustics dilemma. They were willing to hazard the potentially
conservative reactions of acousticians and musicians, who are dependent on
experience and cautious about the predictive powers of acoustical "science."
Böhm and Gehry took the second path.
Yet, no matter which of the two paths he took, each participant had to
demonstrate to the clients and their acoustical consultant that his approach
would be sympathetic to the concern that "there should not be a single bad seat
in the hall." Halls with superb acoustics do exist, and four were named as
exemplars in the program: three classic "shoeboxes" and the adventurous Berlin
Philharmonie. But because the program also asked that "audience seating . . .
be subdivided into separate groups of seats . . . to provide greater intimacy
between the audience and the performers" and that "the entire audience feel
united," it seemed to premiate the Philharmonie over the shoebox solution or
suggest that the architects take their chances with jeopardous centralized
planning. In regard to the design of the concert hall, then, the participants
divided differently. Böhm and Stirling designed more centralized halls, while
Gehry and Hollein turned to the configuration of the Philharmonie.
Bôhm
Böhm's concert hall was the least developed in the competition. Although
it was the culminating element of his parti, he conceived it as a compositional
and structural microcosm of his whole design, rather than as the generating
nucleus. Thus, Böhm's hall can be understood only in terms of that whole. Like
a hot-air balloon moored to guy wires and stakes, Böhm's dome rises above the
four piers at its base and the six octagonal towers that surround it. The towers
support a double-loaded ring corridor of offices, servant spaces, and roof
gardens that encircle the dome in a horseshoe shape. This collar extends across
Grand Street in two bridges at First and Second streets and, like a boomerang,
thrusts the buoyant dome back toward Bunker Hill and the triad of Böhm's office
towers on axis to the east. The dome's open, cage like structure not only invited
visitors to move along vertical, horizontal, and diagonal tracks created by rings,
balconies, stair wells, ramps, elevator shafts, and escalators but also made their
movements visible from within and without both during the day and at night.
Böhm had launched the idea of the floating vertical "climbable sculpture" with a
glazed double skin in his unsuccessful competition project for the Museum of
Modern Art in Hamburg, which he conceived as a turreted tower.
If the most immediate associations of Böhm's design are with festival
pavilions, its "deep structure" seems linked to his lifelong fascination with
devotional space. Indeed, the real parti--nowhere acknowledged in his narrative-is that of a late twentieth-century pilgrimage church. His urban mall to the east
forms the nave, his domed pavilion marks the crossing, and the Concert Hall
(beneath the Grand Reception Hall) is the sanctuary; actually, it is like a medieval
"double church" with a hall crypt for pre-concert events and an elevated chancel.
This sanctuary is flanked by two transept chapels (the Chamber Hall and the
Founders' Room) and served by a series of radiating chapels for "clergy" and
"pilgrims" in the elevated ring structure. The dramatic renderings of the exterior
reveal a form that clearly resembles structural diagrams of Renaissance or
Baroque domes--like significant precursors by Brunelleschi and Michelangelo
that are supported by pendentives and columns and have double shell
structures, which visitors may explore. In a similar fashion, Böhm's sections
suggest the interior effects of San Vitale in Ravenna, where the play of square
and octagonal elements is mediated by semicircular apses through which space
flows out from the center.
These are elements that recur in Böhm's plans for the concert hall, and
they are drawn from a long line of ecclesiastical experiments by Böhm's father
(Riehl, Cologne) and continued in his own work (Cochem-Sehl, Soest,
Kalscheuren). As he noted, "What fascinated me was how richly one could
articulate space with web like constructions." The shared ground between
Böhm's ecclesiastical and industrial imagery for Disney Hall lies in mid
nineteenth-century neo-gothic structural rationalism and, more specifically, in
Viollet-le-Duc's designs for concert halls and the Crystal Palace in London, where
concerts attended by tens of thousands were held.
Böhm's concert hall duplicates at a smaller scale the structure of the
cupola. He devised the hall as an elevated volume with a centralized plan, which
is supported above the pre-concert amphitheater on four piers that penetrate the
center of its elliptical section--a flying-saucer shape (figure 14). The piers are
joined by catwalks and, above them, by trusses that support two levels of
reception halls, only one of which is indicated clearly in section. Like the piers at
the crossing of a centralized church, the piers in the hall define a core, and they
seem to support the tiers of seats, which are disposed in trapezoidal and
triangular loggias that rise away from the core in what Böhm termed a
"logarithmic spiral curve." He described the geometries of these loggias, which
are generated by the need for acoustical reflection walls, as "flowerlike in form."
The seating areas, however, occupy less than half the hall's total height, which is
not calculated to meet acoustical requirements but is driven by Böhm's need to
elevate balconies and reception spaces to fill his cupola.
Because Böhm made largely impressionistic perspectives of his concert
hall and included discrepancies in the plans and sections, one looks to others of
his designs for more information. Unfortunately, they yield little more than his
sketches of 1974 for the Bundestag Assembly Chamber in Bonn, in which he
experimented with a centralized hall that is similar in section. His description of
the materials and decoration of Disney Hall is also generalized but makes
allusions to wood, ceramic tiles, and fresco wall paintings that would probably
have generated an image more functional than luxurious. His other auditoriums
(the Rathaus and Kulturzentrum at Bucholt and Bürgerhaus at BergischGladbach) often resemble multi-purpose halls like gymnasiums with exposed
steel, ceramic tile, and other sturdy institutional materials. In design, materials,
and ideological disposition, Herman Hertzberger's Muziekzentrum in Vredenburg
of 1977 might represent a contemporary analogue to Böhm's entry. Embedded
in shops and restaurants at the core of a non-elitist entertainment center,
Hertzberger's hall, with its exposed structural elements, had a democratic and
populist flavor. Such was the alternative that Böhm suggested for the Disney
Hall, but it failed to win acceptance.
Stirling and Wilford
Stirling also chose a centralized plan for his concert hall, to which he
devoted singular attention in his competition entry, creating a hall generated by
geometry, structural engineering, and acoustics. As we have noted, his parti
created a strong hierarchy of functional elements. The cylindrical shape of the
concert hall provided--as at Stuttgart and Monheim--a dramatic single image for
the building. Subordinate to the concert hall were the U-shaped "domestic villa,"
which was packed with programmed functional spaces, and the smaller pavilions,
such as the chamber hall and those on First Street. The hierarchy was
reinforced by the choice of materials: the concert hall might, like Isozaki's MOCA
Stirling and Wilford suggested, be executed in red sandstone with large areas of
glass framed in bronze; in contrast, the "villa" and the First Street pavilions were
to be beige- or ochre-colored stucco. From the street, the hall's glazed curtain
wall gave views of concertgoers moving on the "flying" escalators that activated
the foyer and on the columned ring balconies that circled the upper levels of the
hall. But the real drama and dynamism of Stirling's structural ingenuity were
perceived only from inside the foyer. Here the visitor gazed up at the suspended
concert hall, which was hung like a sling or a cradle from three triangulated
vertical circulation cores and which was fed by radial spokes from the peripheral
reinforced concrete, duodecimal-shaped ring balconies that were also supported
by the cores.
However, the space around the cradled hall--and within the cylinder--did
not stand in isolation. The foyer flowed into the spaces between the cylinder and
the villa (to the south), around the bars and lounges beneath the chamber hall (to
the west), and among the three smallest pavilions (to the north). Stirling's
placement of the pre-concert theater in the open residual space between the
curved hall and the rectilinear villa and chamber hall was another masterful
stroke of three-dimensional excitement. But the other in-between spaces
remained merely zones of passage, rather than places where programmed
activities could find special expression. In contrast to Hollein who--like Corbu at
the Chandigarh Assembly before him--took advantage of every such space,
Stirling seemed unsure of how much identity he could give them without
disturbing the play of discrete shapes that was the basis of his formal
composition. Providing a solution for the treatment of these residual areas
clearly represented the contemporary classicist's dilemma: the difficulty of
forging unities when most programs demand a multiplicity of parts as well as
complexity in adjacencies. Stirling appeared not to have struggled enough with
the practical problems of the program, notably with the quality, character, and
functional nature of the spatial adjacencies required by the musicians. Their
needs were too often relegated to the more standardized spaces in the villa.
Stirling's concert hall, however, was the heroic product of brilliant invention and
intense effort.
The "snowflake," as Stirling and Wilford referred to the concert hall's form,
displayed acoustically inspired concentric geometries. Its interior was radically
different in effect from Böhm's amphitheater and had some resemblances to St.
David's Hall in Cardiff (J. Seymour Harris Partnership). Although described as
"intimate and restful," the interior gained real vigor from the plasticity of the
balcony trays that took a variety of strong shapes (squares, trapezoids,
parallelograms, bastionated polygons, and fans). These interlocked to compose
what resembles a crystalline solid or a form viewed through a kaleidoscope. The
tiers of seats alternated among perspectively recessive volumes--given shape by
the geometries of their rear walls--and projecting masses, defined by the
supporting walls beneath them. Only the upper tier of balconies had any
overhang, but they slid gently forward in alternating bays and had curved
undersides and thin lips to soften the transition to the ceiling. The in-out
movements of these variously shaped and interlocking platforms evoked not only
the functionally determined geometries of fortifications but also the strong and
aberrantly willful geometries of early Stirling, as at Leicester or the Cambridge
History Faculty Building. Of course, the geometries would have been softened
by their treatment in "high quality natural materials (timber, plaster, brass, plush,
etc.) [that] would provide warm tactile surfaces." The concert hall clearly
represented Stirling's and Wilford's search for new possibilities within the
formalist mode of recent years. It was a design that did not abandon Stirling's
earlier work but returned to it for solutions that moved the work forward. The
links between structure, geometry, and irregularly shaped interior volumes in the
concert hall were crucial advances in the oeuvre of Stirling and Wilford. But the
concert hall alone was unable to win them the competition.
Gehry
More than any other competitor, Gehry let the mass of his concert hall
generate the whole composition and speak directly across the site to the
Chandler Pavilion. The exterior shell encased a hall modeled after Hans
Scharoun's Philharmonie--a successful shape for audience-orchestra interactions
and one with proven acoustical properties. Gehry incorporated the
expressionistic, aerodynamically engineered forms of Scharoun's work: "a bird of
the imagination," Kurt Forster notes, "that has had its wings clipped." But
Gehry's plan of the upper concourse shows how he let the wings stretch out
again in full flight. Even more in Gehry's work than in Scharoun's, one feels the
importance of an abstracted but still figural imagery: rays from above or other
fish in profile, the latter reflected in the finlike seating sections that sweep from
the stage toward the back, rather than toward the sides.
However, Gehry's design departed decisively from the Berlin Philarmonie
in its massing, which was generated from reflections of the principal seating and
performance areas. In two stepped and splayed masses at the base, which
suggest the centrifugal broadcasting of the sounds from the stage, Gehry
expressed the lateral offstage flow of musicians below and the lateral finlike trays
of seating above. Atop these, Gehry placed another vectorial mass that reflected
the two upper trays of seats, which were clefted at the center to produce
reflection walls and a service core. He crowned the whole with a small mass that
revealed the musicians' platform and the seats in front of it. And from the foyer,
the entire configuration suggested movement to the stage.
The character of Gehry's concert hall also departed significantly from
Scharoun's in the nature of its materials and surfaces, which he described in
terms of their splendor and softness. The exterior of the concert hall was to be
"French limestone . . . sculpted with simple curved forms to express the
sensuousity of the stone," and the interior would evoke "with the introduction of
columns . . . a feeling of elegant classical European halls. . . . Rich wood on the
walls [would] catch the light . . . [and] tapestry-like fabrics might cover the seats
in a floral pattern to suggest a metaphysical garden." Finally, "diffuser 'clouds'
[would hang] above the orchestra as crystalline 'shell-like' forms creating a giant
functional chandelier." The last details, of course, invoke comparison with the
translucent, scaled surfaces of Gehry's fish sculptures. There is nothing ordinary
in these decorative forms, and they softened and transformed the angular
shapes and unrelieved surfaces of Scharoun's volumes. Gehry's concert hall
interior was a warm and even glowing enclosure, which visually encouraged a
profound exchange between musicians and audience.
As Forster notes, there is something aquatic about Gehry's interior. Yet it
is also a primal and hermetic space. The sources were not made explicit, but
there is something "Egyptian" in this sealed and rounded temple with its
hypostyle hall, lotus columns, and mastaba. Viewed from above, the Egyptian
qualities seem hauntingly embedded in the masses--like some highly abstracted
image of Tutankhamen, which both protects and unifies. Perhaps it was the
sculptor in Gehry that led him to concentrate on the hall's imagery, exterior
massing, and internal articulation, rather than on its acoustical shape. The
sculptural elements of the columns, translucent ceiling, and floral imagery might
survive all future changes in the hall's design and, therefore, are an important
component in Gehry's competition strategy.
Hollein
In his competition narrative, Hollein acknowledged that the concert hall
was the generative force of his composition. He searched for a unique
expression that would differentiate it from all others and "be a step into the
twenty-first century." It was to be a "space suggesting the complex but fraternal
relationship of people of all backgrounds coming together in the enjoyment of
music. . . . People will be able to both identify with the concert hall as a hall but
also with the character of the particular space they are in. . . . The general mood
of the room, the atmosphere, is light, exuberant, joyful, with a touch of distinction
and splendor." The Disney Hall competition commission gave Hollein the
opportunity to return to cherished ideas about auditorium design, which he had
begun to explore as early as 1963 in a theater for Washington University. And
he made the quarter-century link between the two programs explicit by
reproducing the earlier project in his competition narrative. It had been
envisioned as a freestanding sculptural mass with projecting trapezoidal volumes
that housed audience seating or, conversely, small stages. In plan, it derived
from Alvar Aalto, but as a form in space it contained all the explosive power of a
Franz Kline painting. For Disney Hall, Hollein tamed the sculptural qualities of
the Washington University design with more restful and protective ovoid forms.
Drawing on his earlier experiment, Hollein's concert hall was spatially and
iconographically the most ambitious in the competition.
The design was irregular and asymmetrical on every axis. In plan, Hollein
began with an elliptical stage area at the core and distributed a primary set of
seats in concentric waves around it. The resulting configuration was that of a
coliseum, in which fifty-four percent of the seats were within twelve meters of the
stage. This coliseum shape, however, existed only in plan because the tiers of
seats followed different slopes within distinctly shaped sections, which were
mediated by lateral reflection walls for acoustical considerations. It is in the
distribution and iconography of the seating areas that the resourcefulness of
Hollein's imagination is revealed with most forcefully. The premier section was a
rectangular axial extension of the seats immediately in front of the stage. By
means of plan overlays, Hollein based the stage-to-audience dimensions of this
area on those of the Grosser Musikvereinssaal in Vienna, which the program
heralded as an exemplar. In reality, however, Hollein's two rear banks of seats
had an asymmetrical, convergent relationship that owed more to Alvar Aalto's
Opernhaus in Essen than to classical shoeboxes.
To either side of this "traditional" axis, Hollein grouped various sections of
seats, each of which was given specific character through its shape, incline, and
reflection walls. Toward Grand Avenue, he disposed a series of small,
staggered, fan-shaped terraces, which provided the most intimate groupings in
the hall. Toward Hope Street, he created a womblike elliptical hall that was
based on the horseshoe configurations of baroque theaters. This theater-inminiature was the most aristocratic section in decor, for it was crowned by a back
lighted exedral "Oscar" gallery--a Los Angeles variation on the caryatids of the
Goldener Saal in Vienna. It was also the most private area due to the closure
provided by the wedge of an intervening reflection wall. Although many of the
seats in this section faced the side of the stage, their exclusivity and aristocratic
iconography might have made them unusually desirable. Diagonally across the
hall, Hollein developed a different iconography, that of a raised Greek
amphitheater. Like the miniature baroque theater, it was crowned by a
backlighted colonnade and had less-than-ideal seats that faced the side and rear
of the orchestra. It was perhaps appropriate, then, that above and adjacent to
this populist and democratic space Hollein placed a bust of Walt Disney, looking
toward the remaining two, even less desirable, sections, which were disposed
like simple bleachers. The dramatically massed volumes of the concert hall
provided for the clear expression of its parts, but Hollein always allowed those
parts to belong to the greater whole--just as he enabled the audience to move
toward the stage from any seat. There is no doubt that, in the spirit of the Berlin
Philharmonie, Hollein's concert hall achieved a bold new expression in design,
but it perhaps terrified some members of the committee because of its acoustical
"unknowns."
If the concert hall was the most arresting and powerful element in Hollein's
design, it was not his only achievement. He took advantage of the richly varied
shapes at different levels beneath the sections of seats to house special
programmatic spaces (Founder's Room, Green Room, Music Director's Suite),
which he brought together through interlocking, sinuous, attenuated S-scrolls that
were similar to those he used at the Austrian Travel Agency at Opernringhoff
(Vienna). Thus, he wrapped the hall with programmatic elements to create
exciting patterns of circulation and insulate the hall from ambient noise. The
wrapping gave desirable exterior views to those who used the privileged
programmatic spaces, but, of course, these rooms also buried the shape of the
hall and did not allow its clear sculptural expression either internally or externally.
If Hollein had strong ideas about the configuration of his hall, he was more
tentative about "the relationships of the other parts of the building [which] are
variable." In the competition drawings, he illustrated four variant partis (schemes
B, C, F, and H), which he had presented at the mid-term competition review, as
well as a new alternative study. Undoubtedly, his strategy was to show his
flexibility, versatility, and willingness to work with the clients on the most
appropriate configuration, but perhaps the committee perceived Hollein as
indecisive. On the other hand, Hollein might have felt that it was important to
expose some of the ambiguities inherent in the program.
Interestingly, one of Hollein's partis was quite similar in plan to Gehry's
winning entry; it had two diagonally disposed elementary forms, which were
balanced across an enclosed garden. But it was this spare parti that Hollein
abandoned most readily in favor of denser and more complex arrangements.
Ironically, if the overall intricacy of Hollein's entry might have worried some, the
parti also had plain elements that must have been troublesome to those who
embraced complexity with greater ease. The axial spine that processionally
linked the concert halls to the Chandler Pavilion contained large basilical spaces,
namely the Grand Reception Hall on the piano nobile and a low and uninspiring
entry passage at ground level. There was, perhaps, too much of this preamble.
In conclusion, then, Hollein and Gehry followed opposite strategies.
Gehry invested his energy in the larger issues that would engage everyone on
the committee and let the controversial hall await the acousticians. Hollein, on
the other hand, concentrated his efforts on a very daring and complicated hall but
was vague about the final parti for the whole. Gehry's composition, and perhaps
his strategy too, won him the competition. But in the end, who knows, perhaps
he will have to begin anew at both ends of the spectrum.