Disney Family Acts to Keep Gehry on Project

For the first time in the troubled history of the proposed Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Disney family is stepping forward to take control of how the family’s money should be spent. The move proposes a solution to a dispute over who should complete the building’s design.

The dispute broke out in late May between Frank O. Gehry, the project’s architect, and its lead fund-raisers, Mayor Richard Riordan and businessman Eli Broad.

Diane Disney Miller, whose mother, Lillian, gave the kickoff gift of $50 million that launched the proposed new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Music Center a decade ago, said Wednesday that she has decided to allocate up to $14 million of the unused funds from the family’s gift to ensure that the world-renowned architect will complete the drawings for his unique, undulating design, in conjunction with contractors.

In a May 31 letter to Broad, Gehry had threatened to withdraw from the project when Broad, president of SunAmerica, and Riordan were preparing to invite contractors to provide bids on the project without allowing Gehry to finalize his design. According to their plan, a contractor would have had license to hire an outside architect to complete the drawings on a tighter schedule than Gehry was requesting.

The dispute came as Gehry was earning accolades from international critics for his latest building, the Guggenheim Bilbao, in Bilbao, Spain. Gehry’s threat to withdraw from Disney Hall caused an outcry from the architectural community, which said no other architect could finish Gehry’s work.

A series of meetings between the fund-raisers, Music Center officials and representatives of the architect ensued, and after a private meeting late Wednesday at the mayor’s residence, Los Angeles Philharmonic President Robert Attiyeh and Music Center Chairman Andrea Van de Kamp called Miller’s plan a “done deal.”

An attorney for Disney Hall’s oversight committee said that he ishammering out details of a formal agreement and that a “positive” outcome will be announced within the next few days.

Nevertheless, after the meeting, Miller said she was “confused” about whether there had been a resolution, although she said she remains hopeful.

Miller has consistently championed Gehry, but until Wednesday she had never insisted that fund-raisers follow a path at her direction. She said in an interview Wednesday that concerns over a repeat of the escalating costs that caused the project to be halted in 1994 caused her to take action.

“It could go so wrong again,” she said before the meeting. The fund-raisers have “worked very hard at it and they’ve done it very well, but it’s time now to get drawings completed. I think it will help the fund-raising. I feel confident that it is the right thing to do.”

Miller presented her plan to Broad, Riordan, Van de Kamp, Attiyeh and County Board of Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky. Also present was Miller’s husband, Ronald W. Miller, a former president and chief executive of Walt Disney Productions who resigned in 1984.

She presented a four-page memo titled “Moving Forward With Walt Disney Hall,” which says that while recent pledges have been made to the project, “some of these recent donors hesitate to have any of their gifts spent on Disney Hall until the design is finalized and it is confirmed that Disney Hall can be constructed at an appropriate level of cost,” and at the same time those donors do not want to pay for design development.

Miller said that to ensure that the process continues in a timely manner, the family money will be used to commission Gehry to complete the design and to hire a project manager and construction firm from those already identified by Broad to work with Gehry for four to six weeks to finalize construction plans and develop a budget.

“It’s in her genes to respect the artist,” Gehry said Wednesday night upon hearing about the plan. (He was not present at the meeting.) “That’s been apparent from day one. From when I won the competition. . . . If everybody’s happy, I’m happy. I was willing to do anything they wanted, as long as it was a process that I could feel comfortable with. And I feel comfortable with this. I don’t think anybody else can do the drawings as efficiently as we [Gehry’s firm] can because we understand our own language and we’ve been doing it and it’s hard to train somebody else to do it.”

In 1994, all architectural planning and activity ceased when new cost estimates began to spiral upward. An outside construction manager was hired to undertake a cost review, and because the building would be on county-owned land, county supervisors threatened to declare the project in default due to construction delays.

In 1995, the county agreed not to default the project after Disney officials presented a fund-raising plan with concrete deadlines. Since December 1996, the project has experienced a rebirth in fund-raising with Broad and Riordan at the helm, bringing in more than $70 million in new funds.

Miller said she hopes that both Broad and Riordan will stay on as active fund-raisers. However, she has said that she will take up fund-raising on her own if necessary.

Any new money pledged to the project will not be touched until drawings are complete, now scheduled for spring 1998. “It’s an important part because it gives the donors confidence that their pledges will go where they intended it to go,” Miller said.

The bottom line, she added, is the quality of the building.

“We have in our backyard here Frank Gehry. . . . He is acclaimed everywhere else in the world but here. It’s such an interesting parallel because when my dad was alive, it seems that he was more appreciated in Europe and Latin America than he was here in the United States, especially in Southern California. And it seems to be the fate of local geniuses. Maybe they are taken too much for granted in their own territory.”