Colburn School’s Design Strikes Vital Note

I was fortunate enough to have been among the guests invited to the opening of the Colburn School of Performing Arts two Sundays ago. Since CalArts will be a neighbor of the Colburn School once our own new theater opens at the Walt Disney Concert Hall site, it was with particular interest that I made my way among the assembled civic, arts and education leaders into this gracious new building.

Having seen the delight on the faces of the gifted children at work in the rehearsal spaces and later performing on the stage of the central performance hall, and having felt the warmth emitted by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer’s wonderful space, I feel compelled to respond to Nicolai Ouroussoff’s architectural review of the project (“Just Off-Key,” Calendar, Oct. 5).

Rather than seeming “bland” or “sterile,” the Colburn School invigorates the Grand Street corridor. It is ambitious without showing off and is to be commended for its nod to current and future neighbors. Certainly, it is unfair to compare the Colburn School with the Walt Disney Concert Hall or with MOCA, without being sensitive to the radical differences in its program and budget. Nor can the architect be held accountable for past failures in downtown planning or deficiencies in urban amenities that currently exist.

Ouroussoff did little to address the interior of the building. Inside, student-friendly spaces--from ballet studios and acoustically effective rehearsal halls to the reconstruction of the Heifetz Studio--coexist in a well-thought-out and fluid manner. The concert hall itself, with unusual and effective lighting and excellent acoustics, is warm and elegant without making gestures that might overwhelm the young musicians who will be performing there. It made an entirely appropriate home for the sometimes astonishing performances that marked the opening. After the concert, the audience moved out to the newly landscaped plaza with ease, and it was a pleasure to share the small but deftly realized outdoor space with a few lingering MOCA patrons.

In short, and in contrast to Ouroussoff’s perceptions of the school in its context, the Colburn opening offered an all too rare experience downtown: young and old, Asian, white and African American mingling freely in a context that bespoke inclusion and not exclusion. Far from isolating itself and putting students and passersby in a mutually voyeuristic relation to one another, the Colburn School will invigorate Grand Avenue both urbanistically and musically. It is perhaps no accident that the other building downtown that most effectively conjoins inclusiveness and urbanity, the Central Library, was also designed by Norman Pfeiffer and his firm, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer.

We in Los Angeles are blessed that a visionary like Richard Colburn saw fit to endow a school not in a “safe” Westside enclave distant from Los Angeles’ multiethnic core but directly in its center, as a beacon for further accomplishment and development. Rather than denigrate their considerable accomplishment, Ouroussoff would do well to laud Colburn, Pfeiffer and the other talented and committed individuals involved who are joined by their belief in the importance of arts and education and their pursuit of a vibrant downtown.

All of us at CalArts look forward to being neighbors of the Colburn School of Performing Arts and to a productive cross-fertilization with one another and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, MOCA and the other great arts organizations downtown that will enhance all the institutions involved and our city as a whole.

All indications are that the Colburn School’s students will be as vital, imaginative and fully realized as their new home.

Steven D. Lavine is president of California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.