Sound Vision

Standing amid Frank Gehry’s models of the Walt Disney Concert Hall at the Museum of Contemporary Art, you can close your eyes tightly, click your heels and travel to an alternate present: The imposing concert hall rises above you, and Los Angeles is the epicenter of a booming, multifaceted culture--a window into a new world.

Alas, open your eyes and the vision vanishes. The current exhibition of Frank Gehry’s concert hall design belongs to 1988, when the design was first announced. Inside the pavilion Gehry built for the current show, an old photo of a grinning Lillian B. Disney and her late husband, Walt, peers down at you. Below, a second photo from 1992 shows the renowned architect and various officials plunging their shiny shovels into the concert hall site at First Street and Grand Avenue, across the street from where you now stand. Because of huge cost overruns, they got no further than the underground garage. The intricate models laid out in front of you are still just that. With a new fund-raising drive launched and at least $50 million needed by June 1, there is only hope.

What have we lost? Gehry’s mission was to design the latest addition to the downtown Music Center as both a great civic monument and an authentic public space. In doing so, he was to create a symbol of hope for a battered city. He succeeded. Disney Hall’s power comes from Gehry’s remarkable ability to combine an ecstatic formal beauty with a genuine openness to the city.

But the design also marks a meaningful shift in the language of architecture: In a city split between high and low cultural ambitions, it is a fusion of high art and pop sensibility--an apt symbol for this city. By building it, Los Angeles will both give concrete form to a key moment in architectural history and create a cultural landmark of international merit. Few cities have that luxury.

Two models, both built in 1993 for the benefit of the concert hall’s principal patron, the aging Lillian Disney, are the show’s centerpieces. In the main gallery, a 10-foot-long model sets the project in its immediate context. Covering an entire downtown block west of the justifiably much-maligned Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Gehry’s concert hall is an explosion of forms reaching up out of a shallow plateau of gardens.

The proposed hall faces Grand Avenue--Los Angeles’ subdued cultural corridor--and part of its mission is to wake up this street. Along Hope Street, the “back” of the building is intentionally closed and private, a walkway slips up along the top of a two-story wall where a row of glass doors lead to the principal dressing rooms.

But the Grand Avenue facade seems to kneel down to the street, coyly inviting the public in. Curving panels tilt dramatically upward above the entry foyer. There is no single grand entry: The public must filter up from the garage below or find its way in almost mysteriously along the street. At each corner, swerving, monumental stairs weave up to the public gardens.

In one of the few areas of Los Angeles totally devoid of nature, the gardens are the project’s most generous gesture: an eager investment in public space at a time when streets and civic structures are regularly being converted into profit-generating machines for consumption--like New York’s Times Square and Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, to name two. These gardens are a supple buffer, softening the hard-edged city.

In fact, the design works as a series of screens and filters, gently separating public and private, the chaos of the city and the order of the music, the everyday and the sublime. The concert hall is essentially a simple core loosely cloaked in more flamboyant, overlapping forms. Exterior balconies and foyers are cradled behind great curved panels of French limestone. The image is of a refined Venetian, wrapped in layers of sensuous fabrics.

Gehry once said that he wanted to re-create the social energy he found in Hans Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonic Hall, a place where you come to expect chance encounters. Judging from the models, his success seems assured: These spaces combine the tension inherent in all great civic architecture--it is both exuberantly social and sensually private.

The choice of limestone cladding, illustrated here by a full-scale section of a wall, emphasizes this shift from Gehry’s reputation as pop-architect to refined sculptor. Gehry has often vacillated between the softer stone and a zinc-cladding that is more in keeping with his earlier obsession with crude everyday materials. It is a symbolic choice between high art and low--and at times Gehry still bemoans the final decision. (The zinc comes with a $10-million discount.)

But the core of the MOCA show stands detached from the main gallery: a towering titanium-clad box, its walls tilted gently outward, that houses the model of the interior. A narrow hole is carved out at one end, where visitors can slip in, one or two at a time, and stand inside the concert hall itself. The 1:10 scale model is sheathed in heavy wood, its womb-like walls are enveloping.

Like the architects of the High Renaissance who crafted wooden maquettes to study the forms they were creating, Gehry used this model to refine the shape of the interior and test its acoustics. Michelangelo shaped St. Peter’s many times in model form, and reshaped it again as it rose; Gehry works in much the same way. Even at this scale, with your elbows resting on rows of miniature seats, the physical intimacy of the concert hall is overwhelming.

*

In the context of the development of Gehry’s work, Disney Hall falls between the vastly more elaborate Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which will be completed this spring, and the block-like compositions that the architect crafted in the early ‘80s in Los Angeles as his career began to rise. Bilbao was possible because Gehry completely succumbed to the computer. The forms--both inside and out--are unabashedly free-flowing.

But in the late ‘80s, while working on Disney Hall, Gehry’s relationship to the computer was more hesitant. The concert hall’s structural frame is essentially a distorted box welded to a more supple skin. We are balanced between two competing ages--one backward looking, the other almost too liberating.

However, that tension only adds to the project’s power. Gehry was one of the first architects--and certainly one of the most talented--to create an architecture of conflict, one that juxtaposes forms in complex opposition to one another. But his interest, both formally and socially, is in how these forces coexist. It is a gentle, somewhat distorted, humanism.

Architecture, after all, is only one aspect of the social contract; despite the dreams of the early modernists, it cannot cure social ills. But by shaping the boundaries between us, Gehry reminds us that the purpose of architecture is to reach beyond the bare essentials of survival and to comment on, even shape, the social fabric of the city. To let that hope slip away would be an irreparable loss.

* “Walt Disney Concert Hall: A Celebration of Music and Architecture,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. Tuesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Ends April 27. Free. (213) 626-6222.