Enjoying the view from out of town

Thursday night’s gala opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall recalled many a Broadway premiere and Hollywood awards show, with its red carpet, glamorous audience and jostling paparazzi. What it didn’t have was much suspense about how critics would react -- at least to the building. Major U.S. publications had already weighed in -- the raves were unanimous. Here is a sampling of what these out-of-towners have said about what may be architect Frank Gehry’s crowning achievement, surpassing even the acclaimed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

“The Disney Hall has been likened to a silver galleon with full sails billowing in the wind. Its abstract shapes provide a brilliant contrast to the conventional high-rise towers of downtown L.A.”

-- Marcus Binney,

London Times

*

“Its silvery cascades are one of the most beautiful sights anywhere in the U.S. If you have seen the Grand Canyon, another sun-drenched, curvy thing of hypnotic power, you have some idea of what Disney Hall is like.... Gehry’s design thoroughly digests the Western architectural vocabulary without quoting literally from it. The free-form silhouette is just right for a concert hall in multiethnic Los Angeles, a city that doesn’t look to Europe for much beyond designer shoes.... What he did was a classical hall for an anticlassical city. In Bilbao, his curves make you think of the Spanish baroque. In L.A., they bring to mind all those magic wands in Disney sketching silver arcs in the air.”

-- Richard Lacayo, Time

*

“Though the Bilbao museum is undeniably a work of genius, Disney Hall is more mature, more focused, more polished, and more thoroughly resolved as a single experience; and it is better executed in its details. Everything in this rich and complex orchestration of surface and volume, light and shadow, comes together with an assurance and authority that I found astounding.... [Gehry] can now, in my view, be counted safely among the most talented builders of the ages, comparable to the great impresarios of inventive architectural form.”

-- Martin Filler,

New York Review of Books

*

“Disney Hall is a defining masterwork -- because of [Gehry’s] love for music, for Los Angeles and for his art. Its roller-coaster swoops and gleaming curves seem to mirror his formidable energies and ambitions.”

-- Cathleen McGuigan, Newsweek

*

“The technique is Cubist. No seamless image reveals the whole. Disney Hall must be assembled within the mind piece by piece as you approach and walk around it. A Surrealist ethos also suffuses the design: the imagineering impulse of Disney as well as of Magritte. Pumpkin into carriage, cabbage into concert hall, bippidi-bobbidi-boo.... Metamorphosis happens, and not only in Walt Disney’s classic films. Cities do it all the time. Los Angeles has done it now. The building pulls together the strands of many individual stories and creates an extraordinarily gallant setting in which they can be screened.”

-- Herbert Muschamp,

New York Times

*

“The chief amenity, if it can be called that, is its almost spellbinding beauty. Gehry’s is an art of built-in surprises. He desires the surprise of the immediate ‘Wow!’ And he strives for the delight of longer contemplation. Disney Hall provides both. So, do not be deceived by the beautiful photographs, for as splendid as they can be, they always tend to mask the immense variety of spaces, surfaces and light of the real thing.”

-- Benjamin Forgey, Washington Post

*

“The outside of Disney Hall lifts the spirits of those who see it from the sidewalk or, this being Los Angeles, from the windows of their cars, and the inside is equally inspiring. The auditorium is the finest interior Gehry has ever made.... It may be that restaurants, stores, and housing will rise up around Disney Hall and transform the neighborhood into the urban mecca that so many people seek, but I wouldn’t bet on it, and it doesn’t matter. Disney Hall is something rarer than a great urban street. It is a serene, ennobling building that will give people in this city of private places a new sense of the pleasures of public space.”

-- Paul Goldberger,

the New Yorker