L.A. Has to Get Over Its Edifice Complex

The exhortations continue for support of the Disney Concert Hall, the latest linking the construction of the indulgent $250- million-plus design to no less than the future of the city as a creative and cultural center. We are told by a bevy of architects and academics that other, presumably less favored, cities would not blink at such an opportunity to erect such an icon; that failing to endow the hall would be an indication to the world of the lack of vision and civic spirit in our city, particularly in the entertainment industry.

Happily, we are not just an “other” city, ready to raise a rump to be branded with a building that somehow will lend us a progressive identity. To the eternal dismay of the designPand edifice-inclined community here, architecture does not define the spirit and soul of Los Angeles; there are no overt manmade images or icons, such as New York’s skyline, an Eiffel Tower, a Golden Gate Bridge. We are a city different, which befits our role as the world’s foremost experimental settlement stumbling toward the millennium.

L.A. is primarily shaped and styled not by self-conscious sculptors posing as architects but by the region’s consenting climate, variegated landscape and marvelous mix of peoples. It is this gazpacho prepared in back alley studios, hole-in-the wall theaters, fly-by-night clubs, coffeehouse readings and modest cinemas that nourishes our burgeoning entertainment industry--not a monolithic music center, diverting as it might be to occasionally attend. It is these scattered, accessible singular endeavors that make L.A. so enticing to the ever hopeful that need the support of the entertainment industry--not ego encrusted sculptural exercises.

Such excesses as Disney Hall might have been acceptable, even embraced, in the indulgent 1980s when it was initially proposed, but not now in the leaner, meaner 1990s; not when music and other cultural programs are being eliminated in our public schools because of lack of funds; when the schools themselves are deteriorating. Constructing the concert hall in the face of these harsh realities would be much more mean-spirited than disappointing a few patrons and the ever voracious design and development community.

If indeed we need a new concert facility, or to bolster a depressed downtown, consider that just a fraction of what already has been committed to the Disney Hall could easily underwrite the renovation and revitalization of the Broadway Historic District and its wonderful array of national historic landmark theaters.

As for the site of the Disney Hall, which already has been prepped with a $100-million, 2,500-car underground garage, perhaps it can be used for a park. Or a cathedral.