Concert Hall Design Misses the High Notes

Since first opening in 1986, the Orange County Performing Arts Center has always seemed the poor second cousin to the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles. Its resident music companies lack big-city stature. Its location in a suburban office park across the street from South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa gives it the air of an upscale mall, as if culture were a superfluous appendage to shopping.

But in the past few years, the center has been quietly trying to shed its stigma as a provincial arts venue. This is mostly due to the Philharmonic Society of Orange County’s Eclectic Orange Festival, which has brought world-class experimental fare, as well as the center’s well-regarded dance series and appearances by the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics. Unveiled this month, the design for the new $200-million Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center should be understood as part of that cultural surge. Designed by Cesar Pelli--who is best known for high-profile corporate projects like the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia--the 2,000-seat concert hall will almost double the size of the existing performing arts complex when it opens in fall 2005. Its main feature--a towering glass facade--will serve as a counterpoint to the dull, two-dimensional arch that decorates the center’s existing Segerstrom Hall. What is more--as concert hall officials are quick to point out--the Orange County facility will cost a fraction of the price of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, now under construction in downtown Los Angeles.

But if the design’s mission is to put the performing arts center on the architectural map, it is a flop. Its conventional, relatively unimaginative design does not rise to the level set by Disney Hall, to which it will be inevitably compared. Instead, the project will most likely reinforce the center’s reputation as a second-rate venue. Its greatest value may be its ability to demonstrate in concrete terms why Disney Hall is such a remarkable accomplishment.

Pelli has always been considered a cautious architect, known more for his willingness to cater to clients’ needs than for breaking new creative ground. His is an architecture of surfaces: clean, geometric structures clad in polished marble and glass that have an atavistic, classical quality. The Petronas towers, for example, the world’s tallest buildings, are a hybrid of sleek corporate Modernism and local motifs. Similarly, New York’s World Financial Center--which stands across from the site of the former World Trade Center--is made up of four stocky buildings capped with various decorative tops.

Such projects have made Pelli a darling of developers. But his cultural commissions have not always been so well received. The most famous of these is the 1984 addition he designed for New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The project included a major expansion of the museum’s lobby and a 52-story luxury apartment tower. For the museum, Pelli designed a six-story glass atrium that transformed a once cozy museum into a mall for art, its escalators carrying an endless stream of tourists in and out of the galleries. In 1996, MOMA launched an international competition to redesign the museum. The subtext of the competition was that Pelli’s brand of architecture no longer measured up. (The new renovation and expansion, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, is scheduled for completion in 2004.)

Nonetheless, Pelli continues to land significant cultural commissions. His twin towers in Kuala Lumpur, for example, include an 850-seat philharmonic hall. More recently, he won a coveted commission to design Miami’s Performing Arts Center, which is under construction.

Like these earlier projects, the Orange County design is a throwback of sorts--a building that overlooks a decade of architectural history and cultural progress in favor of conventional corporate design.

The new hall will stand on what is now an empty lot set at a slight angle to the existing hall. The building is essentially conceived as two distinct parts. The concert hall is a rectangular box placed at the center of the site, while the lobby and foyers are tacked onto the front, their curvaceous forms visible behind the glass facade.

As an urban object, the strategy is simple. The two concert halls--one new, the other old--will frame a curved section of the street and an existing traffic circle. During performances, the street will function as a public plaza, giving the area an urban, pedestrian character that it currently lacks.

The hall’s lobby is conceived as an extension of that plaza. Rising 85 feet, its facade resembles a gigantic, pleated glass curtain. Rather than creating a centralized grand entry stair that would obstruct the view to the interior, Pelli places the entries to either side, leaving the entire lobby open to view for the street. In effect, the facade becomes an enormous voyeuristic machine.

That theme is repeated inside, where a spiraling grand stair connects the lobby to a series of upper-level foyer balconies. The stair is conceived as a social space, where music patrons can mingle before and during performances.

As ideas go, this is not a bad one. But it is on the level of execution that the design fails. The undulating glass facade, for example, feels static. The vertical mullions that give the wall its rhythm have a monotony that is reminiscent of architectural mediocrities like New York’s Lincoln Center and L.A.’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion--projects that date to a period in architectural history that most people thought was dead and buried.

A bigger problem is the design’s lack of cohesion. The free-flowing forms of the lobby and foyers seem completely unrelated to the rectilinear box of the hall.

Here, a comparison to Disney Hall is telling. Disney’s performance space is literally wrapped inside a series of foyers and gardens. As audience members move toward the center of the space, the building’s curved walls will slowly envelop them in a conscious process of architectural seduction. In short, the design is conceived as an organic whole, each part dependent on the other. In the Orange County project, the design of the public spaces does nothing to reinforce the sense of anticipation and ultimate euphoria that one feels at a great concert.

That overall dullness is true in the interior of the hall as well. Its vertical rows of balconies, stacked one on top of the other, are an obvious reference to Disney Hall’s enveloping interior. But the magic of Disney Hall will be its intimacy. Disney’s 2,300 seats wrap around the stage, enveloping the music. The new Segerstrom Concert Hall, by comparison, will most likely feel like the box that it is--vast, empty and emotionally cold.

Much of this will be forgiven, of course, if the performances sound good. And acoustically, the hall may turn out to be grander than its architecture. It is now accepted wisdom that the ideal acoustical shape for a concert hall is a shoebox that seats 2,000 or so patrons. That is the formula that Pelli followed.

But real architecture begins after such problems are solved. Its job is to transform the merely pragmatic into something of real aesthetic and emotional value.

Few projects make that point more clearly than these. Years from now, when both concert halls are finally open, they will stand about an hour’s drive apart. Then music patrons will be able to see for themselves why a heavy investment of thought, talent and energy is worth the fuss.