Disney Hall: The Good, The Bad and...the Beautiful?

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My approach:

Disney Hall is a building, within a city, and the normal criteria for judging a building are not to be abandonded because the economic & political forces behind the building are powerful and the architect induces flutters amongst some self-described cognoscenti.

My overall impression:

Good as "precious object," fair (at best) as a piece of urbanism.

•••

The Good

1. Public Discussion of the Built Environment. Disney Hall promotes discussion and one hopes some subsequent awareness of the built environment. Even though (and I'll pop the cork now) I think the Disney will ultimately be seen to be much ado about nothing, and as a failure on its own terms as an engine of redevelopment, yet, still and even, it will have a healthy impact because it gets people talking about cities. Of course spending $250 million to promote a civic discussion seems a bit excessive. A lot of the discussion is puerile and ignorant but maybe some good will come from it; of course I have been accused of Pollyanish optimism.

2. Parking. We didn't park inside. Somehow my great parking karma led us to one of the few on-street parking spaces in the entire district. But we toured the garage on foot and it looked capacious, spacious and with good way-finding -- every level has a nice pastel color theme to help you remember where you parked:

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The multi-level parking garage is beneath the Hall. Access to the sidewalk/entry level of Disney is through a grand stair & escalator passage with visual connection to each level of the parking garage via doors and windows:

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(Yes, that is a Bentley/Rolls-Royce visible through the window.) There is a visual connection between the parking level and the vertical circulation. That's good. It feels friendly and safe. It's an outstanding touch and justifies my insistence that Gehry is a competent architect.

3. The Grand Avenue Frontage It's good. The building comes up to the sidewalk like a real urban building. It's a normal streetfront with a restaurant, shop and entrance. Nice.:

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This frontage could be used to demonstrate that a goofy, "arty," "post-something" building by a "genius" architect can be a good urban building.

A lot will depend on the quality of the restauranteur -- no I don't mean the food per se but how well he is able to expand the somewhat hidden restaurant space and expand it onto the sidewalk with tables & chairs, thus adding some vitality to an otherwise dead environment.

The problem is that this frontage is only 25% of the entire city block; that's not enough good urbanism for a building which is reputed to be a work of genius. Genius, especially, needs a much higher bar.

4. Some nice interior details But nothing beyond what one might find in a good airport or office building:

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If you are a teaser, you can find some philosophical profundity in this incomplete column yearning...yearning.

5. Monitors We noticed at least one in the snack bar which shows you what is happening on stage:

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I'm not sure of the function. Maybe it's to let you know when the musicians are assembling or so you can keep eating even when they are playing. Anyway, they were pretty nice quality screens.

The Bad

1. Blank walls The three other street frontages are almost entirely blank walls. Here's one:

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These fronts are bad. They kill the building as a generator of redevelopment. The Disney is supposed to catalyze an active urban neighborhood. It won't. There cannot be an active pedestrian environment when there are blank walls. Period. And no carping about philistinism can change the reality that people do not like to hang around blank walls and if there is anything that urban redevelopment must mean, for it to have any meaning at all, is that one creates places where people like to hang around.

2. Harsh lighting For an architect based in world movie capital Los Angeles, Gehry seems to have made an odd mistake about lighting. There is a reflective concave wall at what is essentially the 100% spot for the entire building --- the ticket office:

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As the pedestrian passes by, the reflection of the sun is shocking, as this woman shows by her shielding hand:

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(Yes, there is a lot of sun in LA; one can count on it.) The experience is unpleasant; oh I guess one could turn it around and talk about what a stroke of genius it is...that the building actively reaches out and engages the walker...etc and etc and blah blah blah...It's obviously a mistake; or I hope it is.

3. Too few restrooms Not enough on the main entry level. Only one (and that was a uni-sex handicapped) near to the snack-bar. Supposedly we weren't the only ones to look for them; while I was inside, my companion counted twelve people come up to its door. Of course the absurd prices at the snack bar -- we paid $5.95 for a cup of coffee and an iced tea and I remember something like a can of import beer for $6.00 and tiny little salads for $8.50 -- may mitigate the demand.

4. Snack bar hidden inside Moreover the snack bar is hidden well inside the building. It should have been placed at the edge, at the sidewalk, so that people could start making a habit of stopping by, maybe listening to old recordings of the Philharmonic, even when the major part of the Hall is closed. I mean they say they want to change the neighborhood...so that means getting people there...and that means food and drink! :)

(Of course we never got up stairs to the main hall because we didn't have the right tickets so maybe there were plenty of restrooms a long flight up from the main assembly level.)

...The Beautiful?

Who knows. The design is undeniably striking; it photographs well, even beautifully, in the hands of a professional photographer, which I'm not:

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I'd be lying to you if I said that I didn't agree that the exterior is diverting and interesting and different. In fact I'd agree that it is beautiful. Yes, beautiful:

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It is a striking "precious object." I'll even agree "beautiful" at the purely visual level. But would I want to go spend time there? Would I saw "hey babe, let's go stroll around the Disney?" To just hang around it? No. The place is cold and sterile and with a (largely) bad pedestrian environment.

And there the emphasis on beauty shows its limits. And that's why so many of the reviews of the building are so silly (Muschamp's cited below, in particular) or focus on the gossipy politics behind its finance & construction.

It seems to me to take a coarsened and cynical personality to have to stoop to find such swoon-inducing beauty in Gehry's sort of gimmickry. There is beauty all around; when I hear people "ooh" and "aah" (and that seems mostly in print --- I heard no such reactions when at the Disney itself) over the beauty of the Disney I wonder if they ever look around them in their ordinary lives.

•••

Now I like freaky things, too, and maybe it's just my own snobbishness that makes me reluctant to join in the quivering with everyone else. For instance, driving south from LA one chances on this remarkable object:

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It's the Discovery Science Center and was designed by another gimmicky architectural group, Arquitectonica of Miami. (They're the ones who made their bones by designing a building with a hole in it.)

The Cube's visual impact as one is driving south is truly astounding, remarkable, a veritable transcendent aesthetic experience. Honestly. A true "wow" moment which prompted us to turn around, get off the freeway, and investigate more closely. (Try to time it as the sun is setting.) But is it great architecture? A work of "genius?" A significant contribution to the city? Probably not. Or maybe so. Time will tell. It's certainly iconic and a landmark and its location right at the edge of Interstate 5 creates a marvelous vista for drivers. It's fun and frisky and we should take joy in such things. But does it make any "useful statement" (to turn Muschampian rhetoric back on itself) about the urban condition? No.

And nor, I suggest, does the Disney. The Disney is also a large-scale gimmick, a freakish series of swooping roofs. If you like it, you like it. If you don't, you don't. I actually happen to like it; but so what? End of useful discussion. What does it teach us? What is repeatable? Does it fulfill its own goals of helping to change the neighborhood? I doubt that it will.

In terms of the daily life of people, of a city, it's eye-candy trivia. It is an embarassment that so many "design critics" would spend so much time bowing and scraping before it. I won't mention them all for they are many and foolish. Herbert Muschamp's A Moon Palace for the Hollywood Dream and Martin Filler's Victory at Bunker Hill are typical of the syncophantic babble which this building has provoked. If you read these articles and others like them very carefully, I think you might agree that there is not much direct commentary on the physical building itself and/or its context...lots of fancy allusions but nothing very solid.

Of course I make no mention of Disney simply as a place to listen to music, to its acoustics and as a comfortable venue for listening. There are two reasons:
• I haven't heard any music there --- we never got into the music hall per se and
• even if I had I wouldn't waste your time with my opinion about concert halls as I know nothing about music.

So don't get me wrong. The Disney is not a complete failure; the failure is in the critics total and complete failure to be able to view the building as anything but a cartoon. The building indeed has got some positive attributes. But it's basically an example of freak-show architecture and should be considered in that light. I can understand that some people might like freak-shows but I can also recognize that they are not a good model for how humans should evolve. Freaks stand alone and isolated by their unfortunate and tragic nature.

The parallel tragedy of course is that had Gehry paid more attention to the edges, to truly "taking things to the edge," he and Los Angeles could have had a comfortable urban buildingand a glamorous precious object. There is, to my mind, no inherent contradiction. The Disney could have been a truly great urban building had Gehry followed the Three Rules.

UPDATE in response to Michael Jenning's remark:

Well perhaps I didn't emphasize one aspect about the Disney and that is that the structure does "enfront" the street very directly on all four (yes it takes up a full city block) sides. But of course three of those walls are dead and deadening.

Whether, practically, the three blank sides could be punctured, I don't know. I don't know the arrangement of uses at the periphery of the site behind those walls.

But come to think of it, to be rigorously fair, I should post a photo, here:

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It gives onto some sort of administrative office, at sidewalk level obviously, on the very far side of the building. It shows exactly how an institutional building could bring some of its own internal activities --- janitorial, security, purchasing and so forth --- to the edge and puncture its blank walls. Of course an awful lot of institutions are afraid of admitting to any connection with "trade" and so hide these functions away, thus losing an opportunity to enliven the street, if at least with offices. More the better for institutional pride & dignity and the worse for the neighborhood.

And then there is also the matter of "no on-street parking" around the Disney --- you can sense it from the railing which separates the sidewalk from the street in the photo above --- which is also a great detriment to the development of anything exciting happening at the Disney neighborhood. You can also see that the Disney is unfortunately isolated amidst the proverbial asphalt jungle:

Comments

[Michael Jennings]

The interesting thing is that I thought the pedestrian environment of Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim was something that had been got dramatically right, particularly in the way the building interacts with the city streets, and with the pedestrian routes along the river. Maybe it is the difference between Bilbao and Los Angeles. I suspect few people arrive at the Disney building on foot.

[Michael Blowhard]

First-rate discussion, many thanks. I don't know why, but your descriptions and photos make me think of visiting convention centers. Awful things with lots of unpleasant parking and walking challenges, as well as blank walls aplenty to pass by. They never feel like part of a city; they're their own, weirdo moonscapes. Is there anything of the convention hall-experience about visiting the Gehry?

[David Sucher]

Great insight, Michael. That's exactly what Disney does feel like. A convention center. Thanks.

But that's unfortunate because while I don't like convention centers I do love conventions; and I don't say that with even a slight sneer.

I like such meeting where you can run into all sorts of interesting things. Of course I associate them with Seattle's Convention Center which is in the very heart of downtown; and while I could suggest a lot of improvements, compared to a lot of such places, it's not half-bad and actually fairly enjoyable.

But yes, the Disney does remind one of a convention center. Similar sterility etc. But maybe that shouldn't be all that surprising. A concert hall and a convention center do share a lot of similarities such as very large numbers of people converging at one spot for a relatively short period of time.

Very few of either type--- and this is a real shocker when it comes to a convention center considering its very purpose --- work well to promote casual social interaction. That's what I found missing at the Disney -- any sense that one of its functions is to bump into people. You'd think that Gehry would have built-in many and various places (mostly food and drink at different price points, of course) to hang around and run into friends.

[Brigham Yen]

Firstly, I agree with your criticism that the Disney Hall should have had all four sides as inviting to pedestrians and concert attendees alike. Pedestrians walking on the other "blank" sides feel estranged, and therefore, the feeling of coldness exudes from the ostensibly inviting concert hall. I found this to be true as I gave a short tour to a friend who had never seen the place. As I showed him the front of the Hall with it's gracious and grand curves, a feeling of awe naturally occurred from the both of us. However, once we turned the street corner, the feeling subsided. Being an ethusiastic proponent of Los Angeles downtown revitalization, I find it hard to criticize this magnificent addition to the once dead environment.

Nevertheless, I do not agree with you that the Disney Hall fails to be a powerful impetus to downtown revitalization in Los Angeles. You say that $250 million on Disney was too much to spend to galvanize any hopeless efforts or interest in downtown urban development, but I think that is just what was needed to jump start the process. The Disney Hall will do for those who are not cynics something much needed if any urban development is to succeed: to create Pride in your city. Once people are proud of their city, more effort will be invested. And that is something a lot of people do not have in Los Angeles, pride.

The question where this lack of pride stems from is the loss of center, or identity. Sadly, it seems people drive on the freeway en route to anywhere but downtown LA in search of entertainment or living options. The beautiful glass and concrete skyscrapers become nothing but a large 3-D panoramic prop. It's such a pity because this ignored part of town is the key to establishing a strong sense of city pride and identity. How does San Francisco or New York work their magic on residents who proudly wear their "I Love My City" T-shirts? The answer is obvious for those who have visited Union Square or Manhattan.

What Los Angeles lacks compared to SF or NY, it will gain in due time. Like what you said, at the very least, the Disney Hall has attracted attention to "city development" and hopefully this will draw in continued interest from the public. It is self-defeating to criticize without offering hope or other possible successful avenues to take. For instance, the sterile and dead environment surrounding the Hall will need to be developed in the near future. What the "three blank walls" of Disney Hall fail to accomplish in providing an inviting environment, other city venues (i.e., restaurants, theaters, retail, etc.) will have to be built nearby to address this deficiency. Although the Disney Hall did not materialize as the magical panacea many of us had hoped for, there is hope in those like me who wish to see LA with a thriving downtown. Let us work with the Disney Hall's faults, and not stay focused exclusively on them.

[Anita Lefkort]

My husband and I are looking for a TOUR from SF to LA that includes: hotel, tickets to Concert Hall and fare. Anyone out there know of one???

[payton chung]

For what it's worth:
1. The monitors outside the hall help late arriving patrons (and the ushers watching them) to see when the late seating pause (two minutes after the first work) is. Well, at least that's what this preternaturally late orchestra subscriber uses them for.

2. When criticizing 1980s Arquitectonica, remember that Duany and Plater-Zyberk were once founding partners there.
.pc

[David Sucher]

PC,
So that means ...what? We shouldn't crtiticize Arquitectonica? We should especially criticize?

[Brian Miller]

I love the hole in the wall condo tower :)

Very perceptive discussion of the deadening effects of blank walls. I think a big part of the problem is too much focus, absolute focus, on the program. The concert hall or convention center is viewed as a stand alone object that need not relate to anything around it.

[Joe Arch]

Did any of you people actually attend a concert? Seems that might be a nice yardstick.

For me, Gehry's best work engages the participants. On the other side of the freeway you can see his Loyola Law school that has similar antipathy towards the street. Ambivalent content, lawyers to be protected from the street felons they'll someday defend with the ubiquitous chainlink... Yes, yes, I know gawkers on Hill Street are participants, but to attend a concert would be a very different experience, and an experience entirely to the point of whether the project is "good", "bad" or... and, as I think it is, "beautiful."

And aren't tourists the only ones who really wear "I love my city" shirts? People who really love LA just dress well. And they might wear a "I Heart NYC" shirt, but ironically. But then maybe you got that.

[Brady Westwater]

The interior of the concert hall is... superb. Great architecture, a wonderful social experience and the accoustics as good as any hall in the world.

I agee the sides of the building should have been far more animated, but the texture of the building materials is excellent and the landscaping on the non-Grand Avenue sides will eventually warm up those sides of the buildings.

[David Sucher]

Huh? What landscaping?

There is NO landscaping on at least two (West 2nd Street and Hope Street) of the other three frontages.

[disney store merchandise]

i do not like this building at all.