PERSPECTIVE ON DISNEY HALL : Another Bunker on the Hill : Design complexities and an architect’s stubborn creativity are the culprits behind the concert hall’s escalating costs.

A few weeks ago, the news broke that Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall would cost $260 million--$73 million more than was quoted a year ago. Disney family representatives immediately blamed the rising tally on more expensive building materials, increased earthquake-safety standards and the lack of available qualified contractors. They later acknowledged that higher earthquake standards contributed only $2 million to the hike.

Within days, it emerged that design complexities were the real culprits. Changes and cumbersome negotiations with L.A. County had dragged the planning process out for five years, adding more than $16 million to professional and consulting fees and increasing the cost of interior woodwork by $7 million. Important and interested parties were then found to booster the project and the city’s need for it.

Concert halls are notoriously hard to build. The best halls are rectangular buildings with 2,000 seats at most; in anything larger and more architecturally inventive, the acoustics suffer. On Disney Hall, with its 2,380 seats, Gehry spent two years trying to resist this fundamental law before finally accepting what duller minds already knew: that the ideal shape for an auditorium is a shoe box.

Gehry’s stubborn creativity explains other singular costs. He has tried to build walls that challenge the nature of building technology and has gone to great lengths to deny the hall’s identity. He has introduced four layers of ceiling windows to block the sound of overhead helicopters and has fought for zoning variances from the city to let the building encroach on the sidewalk. He has installed aerospace computer engineers in his Santa Monica office and replaced his original acoustic consultant with a Japanese firm based in Tokyo. He has also rigorously defended his right to tinker.

A corporate client might not have given Gehry so much slack but the protracted design process is in some ways exactly what the Disneys wanted. Disney Hall is not just a musical facility but an attempt to lever Walt away from Mickey Mouse and into the pantheon of high culture.

If this serves the interests of the Disneys, does it also serve Los Angeles? Gehry meant Disney Hall to be a radical alternative to the artistic elitism of its immediate neighbor, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But in spite of its modish clothes, Disney Hall was cut from the same cloth. While the Los Angeles Philharmonic gets a new home, Bunker Hill gets another fortified redoubt.

If this is representative of Los Angeles or the Disneys or Gehry, it is representative in the wrong way. It doesn’t belong to the low-rise ticky-tacky vision of a homesteading paradise that makes even South-Central appealing (in a way that the South Bronx is not.) It does not belong to the populist culture that Disney invented and that deserves to be honored on its own terms. And it does not belong to the oeuvre of the Frank Gehry who made his reputation creating minimalist miracles out of no-budget and cheapskate materials (though five years’ work and no building is a kind of minimalism).

What can be said is that Disney Hall conforms to Reyner Banham’s notion of Los Angeles as “home to the most extravagant myths of private gratification.” Selecting an architect famed for his confrontational, uncosmetic aesthetics to represent the inventor of Snow White and Bambi also tweaks Los Angeles’ appetite for the bizarre. If costs have risen, we must expect the gods to smile when they encounter hubris. But not, perhaps, when the public sector has to foot 40% of the bill.