Beauty and the Beastly Project

The critics can’t stop raving when they discuss Walt Disney Concert Hall, the new Frank Gehry creation now rising over Los Angeles. It’s “frozen music,” “a living and breathing monument” and “a lilting and harmonious composition of swelling trapezoids.”

But the workers toiling to erect the dramatically angled building use a decidedly different vocabulary, one that cannot be printed here.

Building a Gehry, after all, is one of the most difficult jobs a construction crew can take on. The one-of-a-kind designs, with their amorphous shapes, gravity-defying angles and swoopy, shimmering walls, guarantee only one thing: a migraine for everyone wearing a hard hat.

“It’s definitely the hardest building I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in 20 years,” said Paul Pearse, an ironworker supervising the construction of the building’s steel structure.

Gehry himself seems to take a certain pleasure in this. On a recent tour of the site he pointed to Terry Bell, an architect who works for him and is the main liaison to the construction crews.

“I’m the one responsible for all his headaches,” Gehry quipped. “He had more hair when he started this project.”

The buildings begin in Gehry’s mind, of course, and in the rough physical models he builds from cardboard, bottles and wooden blocks to express his vision.

“Gehry crumples up a piece of paper or tinfoil, digitizes it and says, ‘Build it,’ ” said Roger Ferch, a vice president of Herrick, the Pleasanton, Calif.-based steel detailer that is creating and erecting the hall’s structural steel.

“This is not even solid geometry,” said Jack Burnell, the blunt-spoken former Chicago architect overseeing the entire project. “This is the architecture of rocket science.”

Rockets are an apt metaphor. Gehry doesn’t rely on architectural software to create his fluid designs. Instead, he uses a French software program called CATIA (Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application), created to design fighter jets.

“It’s not like putting up drywall,” Burnell said.

Forget about that construction site standard, the blueprint. Forget about anything that covers a trifling two dimensions--the way construction documents do in more standard buildings. In Frank Gehry’s world, everything is 3-D, and the construction workers are swept along--or left behind.

“On a job this complicated,” said Burnell, “the guys who can’t cut it get weeded out pretty fast.” Many of the workers have had to learn Gehry’s language: A handful have mastered CATIA, and modeling the building’s systems in 3-D is a first-time experience for others.

The steel structure now towering above Grand Avenue and 1st Street in downtown Los Angeles will be the core, or “the bones,” of the $274-million, 293,000 square-foot building.

For most construction, raising structural steel involves connecting off-the-shelf iron girders at standard right angles.

Not so for Disney Hall.

Here, much of the steel is custom-made. It’s been welded into odd shapes and curves. Many of the undulating beams now visible aren’t so different from the steel sculptures popular in urban parks.

“There are 11,000 pieces of steel out there, and very few are the same,” said Jim Yowan, who is overseeing construction for Minneapolis-based M.A. Mortenson Co. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.”

The nicknames construction workers give to segments of the building offer clues to the fanciful design. The hard-hats do not talk about the south wall, or the sixth floor. Instead, it’s the “satellite dish,” “the south boat” and the “wrappers.”

Sharp Angles a Challenge

The building’s breathtaking angles have been one of the biggest challenges for the crews.

“Nothing is typical of a normal building,” Ferch said. “Even the things that look rectangular are not level.”

The back wall, leaning outward at a sharp 17 degrees, had to be supported as it was built by a temporary steel structure more complicated than the interior of most buildings.

“It was a massive cantilever,” Yowan said. “Tons and tons of steel.”

The temporary shoring reached seven levels down, to the bottom of the underground parking structure, so it could support the building’s massive load. Once the welding is complete and the roof’s concrete is poured, the temporary support will no longer be needed.

The building morphs into something new with each piece added.

“On a five-story building, a 10-story building, or even a high-rise, you get some repetition,” said Ferch, the steel detailer. “Here, just because you got it right yesterday doesn’t mean you’ll get it right tomorrow.”

Those responsible for building Gehry’s masterpiece are not necessarily his biggest fans.

“Give me a rectangular box any day,” Ferch said.

The raising gangs positioning the steel know where to fit pieces only because laserlike devices shoot and measure survey points positioned around the emerging building.

“We build in a virtual space,” said Bell, the liaison architect. The sharp angles mean welders are often forced to work in midair while harnessed to the building.

“Usually, you’re on a square building and you have a floor below you,” said ironworker and supervisor Pearse. “Here it’s wide open.”

A crane operator has to delicately position hefty steel pieces near the structure’s top while virtually blind. He can’t see the top of the building from his operator’s seat. The bolt-up crew sends hand signals to a phone man, who calls orders down to the crane.

But all the work on the front end of the process, the struggling with 3-D models and sweating the design of each length of steel, is paying off as construction workers wedge the pieces into place.

“It’s fitting together really well,” said Bell, who worked with hundreds of engineers and consultants to create the 3-foot-tall pile of construction documents that translate Gehry’s design into reality.

Turning Bell’s documents into rising steel, concrete and metal is the responsibility of Yowan, a Pittsburgh native and veteran of the construction business who knew full well what he was getting into when he took on Gehry.

Yowan was offered the job in 1999 while finishing up a Mortenson project in Northern Ireland. He headed straight over to Gehry’s most famous creation--the shimmering, organic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

“I took the tour. Like a tourist,” he said.

While others ogled the space and the light and the building’s stone, glass and titanium atrium, Yowan absorbed the construction details, contemplated the overwhelming amount of work involved and knew he couldn’t say no to the job.

“I saw it,” he said, as “the ultimate challenge of my career.”

Disney Hall has not let him down.

First, he inherited a suite of problems. The project’s first groundbreaking occurred in 1992. At the time, the building was projected to cost a mere $110 million and was slated to open in 1997. But spiraling construction costs shut down construction in 1995.

Meanwhile, there were major changes in design to control costs and accommodate the stiffer seismic safety guidelines that followed the 1994 Northridge earthquake. For example, the building will be clad in stainless steel, instead of the heavier--and more expensive to install--white limestone originally planned.

And Yowan has to erect this gargantuan concert hall atop another structure--a parking garage that was already built by the county. Workers had to thicken the ceiling of the garage to 45 inches so they could drive a 250-ton crane on top of it. Moving the crane without crashing through the ceiling requires delicate planning.

“It’s extremely challenging. It’s not for the weak of heart,” Yowan said.

Geometric Precision

With such a complex design, there is almost no room for error.

In a normal building, a few inches off can often be rectified easily. A few inches off on a Disney Hall curve could mean a few feet off in another part of the building.

“It’s a disaster,” said Yowan. “If you’re off, the corners won’t match up and nothing will fit together.”

He is now wrestling with the precast concrete that goes atop the steel rigging, particularly the concrete that covers the building’s sharp rear angle. Placing the heavy concrete on the wall, at such a steep angle, is a challenge. The concrete can’t simply be hung as it could be on an ordinary building.

Instead, the job requires a hefty dose of geometric precision. The concrete slabs are first positioned in the precise angle at which they will be placed on the building. That angle has to be maintained even as a crane picks up the huge chunks and lifts them hundreds of feet. A series of wires allows workers to maintain the angle as the concrete swings upward.

“We’re doing a lot of things on this job that we’ve never done before and the industry has never done before,” Yowan said.

He and Burnell are also coordinating the difficult dance of integrating various systems--heating, cooling, electrical and plumbing--into the building. In the curvy building there is not as much room between the steel bones as contractors are used to.

“The poor guys who have to build it, they’re stunned by the conflict between three, four and five systems that all want to occupy the same place,” Burnell said. “It’s like putting a camel through the eye of a needle.”

Almost miraculously, the building continues to rise.

Its dramatic metallic skin is the next major step. It will be attached in coming months. The hall is set to open in 2003, in time for the L.A. Philharmonic’s fall season.

Judging by the number of passersby who stop to gaze at the partially finished structure and its highly choreographed buzz of activity, the performance has already begun.

“The construction of this,” said Tanya Nielsen, a financial analyst for the project, “is like an orchestra in itself.”