13 ways of looking...

For more than a decade of his retirement, Louis Fletcher has lived in the same apartment complex on Olive Street downtown. But the view keeps changing.

These days, when Fletcher looks out past the chairs and plants on his north-facing 16th-story balcony, he sees the east end of the twisted, gleaming, metallic and nearly complete Walt Disney Concert Hall. Or, as some of his 1,300 neighbors in Angelus Plaza (average age: 80) prefer to call it, the Dead Aluminum Bird. Others like the Sparkling Artichoke, the Monster, the Steel Bastille.

His neighbor Lillian Harrow -- she’s the one who came up with Steel Bastille -- calls it “a jumbled mass of steel” and suggests that “when the sun hits the building, the reflection will hit cars and drivers and cause an accident. It’s too much in too little space. It should have been spread around. It doesn’t fit here.”

But Fletcher, a 73-year-old artist who came to Los Angeles from steel-friendly Pittsburgh, will have none of that.

“I liked it from the beginning,” he says. “It breaks that perpendicular thing with the other buildings .... It’s sprouting and it’s telling you, this music is for everybody.”

So goes the conversation as Angelenos behold the city’s newest and perhaps least-rectangular landmark, Walt Disney Concert Hall. The opening galas don’t begin until late October and the inside remains off-limits to the public, but onlookers from perspectives high and low have already begun to judge this book by its cover. Some wince, some giggle, some place palm on solar plexus and beam with pride. In unscientific polling of downtowners who see the site regularly, admirers outnumbered detractors about 4 to 1.

Intriguing fluidity

“I like it,” huffs Ernie Sanchez, a 55-year-old deposition reporter who sits astride an exercise cycle on the second level of the Ketchum Downtown YMCA on South Hope Street. Before the hall went up, you could see the mountains from his cycle on a clear day. But Sanchez prefers the hall, especially its glint in the late light when he comes in after work.

“You look at it, and you look at the building to its left, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and you can see a change,” he says. “A change in philosophy. And it’s about time. The fluidity of it is intriguing.”

A steely gleam

“Tell me,” demands Marie Bustillos, standing at a third-story window in the city Department of Water and Power building. “Is that appealing?” Outside, beyond the DWP reflecting pool and the cars on Hope Street, the hall looms and gleams.

If you work in the DWP’s headquarters, as Bustillos has for several years now, there’s no getting around Disney Hall. You see it from the 15th-floor lobby, from the entrance plaza -- where the concert hall’s silhouette lines up in a sort of visual rhyme with a 1988 metal work by Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro -- and from the third-floor library, where Bustillos now stands.

“It’s all stainless steel. No windows,” she laments. “It looks very cold. Maybe if they had added some color .... It’s as if someone hung pans out there.”

“Yeah,” says her colleague Kendrick Mah, who has mixed feelings about the concert hall. “But don’t you want to put a tennis ball up there, and then see where it goes?”

Bustillos is unamused. It looks, she says disdainfully, “like something that came out from under the ground.”

“Like quartz crystals,” suggests Giovanna Rebagliati, another colleague and a fan of the building.

Rebagliati, 39, grew up in Peru amid stately Spanish colonial architecture. She worried at first that Gehry’s nontraditional design would look silly as a civic landmark, “like something out of Toontown,” she says. “But I love it now. It’s this giant sculpture. The frustration is that I want to see it from every angle, and I can’t.”

Graded by the dean

Already, Julius Shulman has prowled Disney Hall inside and out, been whispered to by the designer, been planning to attend one of the opening galas. But about the building itself, he hasn’t quite decided.

Shulman, 92, is the dean of Southern California architectural photographers, and has been looking at Frank Gehry buildings for about 32 years. He considers the Gehry’s titanium-skinned Guggenheim museum at Bilbao “a masterpiece” and was happy to accept when the architect offered him a private tour of Disney Hall in early May. But

“With due respect for Gehry’s use of metal materials as exterior forms, wouldn’t it have been nice if he had stopped at Bilbao? He’s done endless numbers of the buildings that I call pseudo-Bilbao. He’s so skilled and flexible, there are other things in his vocabulary, I’m sure,” Shulman says.

Yet he finds the interior “absolutely breathtaking .... One of these days, I’ll probably wander around and get some pictures.”

Lone Star stateliness

Back over at Angelus Plaza, 78-year-old resident Eva A. Plasencio thinks the building is so big and beautiful, “it should be in Texas,” where she came from. Her neighbor Ida Moore, 75, thinks it looks “like it’s made out of tin ....But I’m pretty sure we’ll be invited to the opening. That’s one advantage of living here. You get invited to everything.”

Their neighbor Peter Elliott, 70, says: “I probably see it every day, one way or another. I made it a point to go over there and watch the construction. It’s built unlike anything I’ve ever seen ....I think it’s going to be a great draw for downtown. It’s definitely not a box or a rectangle.”

Smoke and fire

As a Los Angeles County fire inspector, Marcos Espiritu is accustomed to following 25 to 30 construction projects at a time. But Disney Hall has taken longer than most -- he’s been working on the site for two years now, in collaboration with city fire officials -- and its details are unlike any other project he has worked.

For instance, Espiritu says, “when we get a fire in a building, we normally do a vertical demolition. We cut holes in the roof” to give smoke an evacuation route. But much of Disney Hall’s roof is concrete, many inches thick, impossible to cut through quickly. Also, two of its stairwells are open, rather than enclosed, as is usual.

And so to give smoke a way out, the hall features a complex system of five smoke-evacuation zones. The features include fans to drive air to roof vents and about a dozen broad glass bi-fold doors, which fold up like garage doors, leaving no barrier between the building’s ground floor and the outdoors.

Beyond that, there are about 3,200 sprinkler heads, 150 smoke detectors, 320 speakers to sound fire alarms, 400 strobes to flash additional warnings. In early August, after consulting with fire officials, the county Department of Public Works issued a temporary certificate of occupancy for the hall’s main area, affirming that the auditorium meets safety and building-code requirements.

“This has been a very challenging building,” Espiritu says. “I’ve asked all the contractors, guys with 20 years of experience, and they say it’s the first time they’ve come across this type of building. It’s very complicated.”

Lifting the spirit

“I’m just tickled to death,” says architectural historian and author Robert Winter.

Winter, who lives in Pasadena, hasn’t been inside the concert hall, but as a Philharmonic subscriber, he’s spent plenty of time at the Music Center, peering across 1st Street at the construction site that is now Disney Hall. And any day now, when Winter’s new edition of “An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles” reaches bookstores, Disney Hall will be on the cover.

“It simply stands out as the best thing in Los Angeles,” says Winter, 79, who shares the author’s credit on the new book with now-deceased architectural authority David Gebhard.

The book includes about 500 buildings around the region, about 60 of which have been added since the last edition in 1994. In a passage on Disney Hall, Winter writes that “although its basic design (much modified since the building was first projected) antedates that of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the resemblance between the two is obvious. The similarity suggests that both buildings embody Gehry’s anxiety to break with tradition, national or international, and to create architecture that will lift the spirit rather than refer to previous notions of what architecture should be.”

Speaking on the phone from Pasadena, the author states his case on Gehry more plainly: “I appreciate his ability to do things that can’t be repeated,” Winter says, “except by him.”

Insanely cool

“I’ve just gotten more and more excited as it’s gone up,” says Nicholas Pappone, a 15-year-old violinist who has been coming downtown from Pasadena for violin lessons since his pre-teen years. “I like modern things, 20th century things ... that progressive look. I think it’s one of the best things to happen to classical music here.”

Near Pappone sits Noah Reitman, an 18-year-old bassist who lives in Beverly Hills and has been taking lessons and playing in chamber groups at the Colburn School of Performing Arts downtown since the late 1990s. The groups practice upstairs in a room with a vast picture window looking out at Disney Hall.

“Bassists never pay attention to the conductor. So we look out the window a lot. So we could see it grow,” Reitman says. “I really like the design, although, let’s be honest, he’s used it in a few other places. I’ve been to Bilbao; I have family in Spain. But you are awestruck by it the first time you see it up close. You think, that’s insane. Good insane .... Now we have the coolest concert hall in the country.”

Harout Senekeremian, a 20-year-old senior at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music who comes home to Pasadena every summer, is just as enthusiastic, and his exposure to the site has been sustained. Last summer, Senekeremian was here daily to work on Scriabin sonatas; this summer it’s a prelude and fugue by the contemporary piano composer Marc-Andre Hamelin. He plays eight hours a day, every day, and on the way in and out, he looks at the hall.

“The building is just ridiculous. I love it,” he says. “And from the pictures of the inside, I love the organ pipes. The French fries.”

And of course, like many other young musicians, Senekeremian is intrigued by the dual access routes between the Colburn School and the concert hall. One is a simple stroll across Grand Avenue.

The other? Practice, practice, practice.

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A 14th perspective

The best view from the hall? It may be the 180-degree sweep of downtown seen from the Children’s Amphitheatre, looking south on Grand Avenue.

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