Disney Concert Hall Goes Back Onto the Drawing Board : Architecture: Frank Gehry must modify his acclaimed ‘Populist’ design of the building to make way for a ‘four-star’ hotel.

Money and politics are complicating plans for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles and requiring the architect, Frank Gehry, to change his acclaimed design for the project.

Plans now call for a hotel up to 40 stories high to be built next to the concert hall on the same piece of property. The County of Los Angeles, which owns the land, has been advocating the hotel plan for several years. Until recently, however, the concert hall committee--a civic support group that includes Mrs. Disney, her daughter and others--had resisted the idea. Nor was the hotel part of Gehry’s original design, which won the competition held last year to select the architect for the concert hall.

Now, Gehry’s greatest challenge may be in retaining the informal “Populist” quality of his winning design for a building that appears destined to sit cheek by jowl with a big, fancy hotel.

The concert hall, to be built just south of the Music Center on Bunker Hill, is intended as a memorial to Walt Disney by his widow, Lillian B. Disney, who has given $50 million for its construction. Frederick M. Nicholas, the chairman of the concert hall committee, said this week that when committee members realized that the concert hall was going to cost at least $90 million, they agreed to the hotel if it could defray some of the costs of the concert hall.

“I started talking to Mrs. Disney about how we could solve the problem of the budget,” Nicholas said. “I came up with the thought that if we could add an additional structure, it could reduce our costs by $15 million.”

He said the savings would be accomplished by having the hotel pay for offices and banquet facilities that were attached to the concert hall and which now might be located closer to the hotel.

Nicholas said Mrs. Disney agreed to the hotel providing it was at least a “four star” facility and that Gehry design it.

At this point, no one associated with the project, including Nicholas, Gehry and members of the jury that selected Gehry, say that Gehry’s original design was intended to be the final plan for the concert hall.

“The design submitted almost certainly was not meant to be the final one,” said Robert Harris, dean of USC’s School of Architecture and a member of the jury. “Once the architect was selected, it was assumed that the really close work would get under way and elements like the hotel would be thoroughly explored. What would remain from the work submitted for the competition was the fundamental inventiveness and skill of the architect.”

The hotel is just the latest wrinkle in a complex set of negotiations involving the county and the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, which brokers downtown development and which views as excessive the county’s plans for building about 2 million square feet of hotel and office space on Bunker Hill. Strapped for revenue, the county has been engaged in a decade-long legal battle with the CRA to break the agency’s hold on property taxes generated by downtown buildings.

Turf War

A spokesman for the committee said it does not want the project to become a pawn in an interminable bureaucratic turf war on Bunker Hill, pointing out that two years have already gone by since Mrs. Disney announced her $50-million gift. But it may be hard for the committee to stay out of the fray. The CRA’s board chairman, James Wood, said Wednesday that he believed the county’s negotiations with the concert hall committee “were designed to get the Disney people to put pressure on us.”

Senior Assistant County Counsel Ray Fortner replied Wednesday that it has always been part of the concert hall lease agreement with the county that backers of the hall would lend support to the county’s efforts to raise revenue from its Bunker Hill real estate.

Supporters of the concert hall say they are sympathetic to the county’s revenue needs--which would be served by the hotel--but worry that too large a hotel would overwhelm the concert hall.

“Obviously, we want something there that will be compatible with the Disney Hall,” Nicholas said.

For Gehry, the hotel is not the only challenge to be faced in reworking the site, which lies between 1st and 2nd streets and Hope Street and Grand Avenue.

Rounded Design

The recommendations of Minoru Nagata, the acoustics expert hired by the concert hall committee, have required Gehry to change the original shape of the concert hall--a rounded, multi-layered flower-like configuration that sought to avoid the appearance of bulk or boxiness.

Gehry said this week he will come up with a “rounded, sensuous” form that will work aesthetically as well as acoustically, and he said he is not worried about the hotel.

“That was always a possibility,” he said.

Gehry, 59, insists that the final form of the Disney Hall will contain the features of his original design that were prized most by the judges of the competition.

Chief among those elements was a glass-roofed foyer, surrounded by gardens, opening onto the corner of 1st and Grand. Gehry has described the foyer as “a living room for the city.” It is meant to be a place, in his words, where free lunch-time concerts can be held, “where a group of Cinco de Mayo musicians might come and play . . . where people won’t be intimidated by having to pay a fee.”

In the final design, “that space will have the same characteristics. . . . I promise you,” Gehry said.

Free-lance writer Leon Whiteson, who reviews architecture for The Times, contributed to this story.