Disney Concert Hall now lights up the night

IF you’ve sensed a new silvery glow downtown after dark, that’s no hallucination. Officials at the Music Center have started training a new set of exterior lights on the metal skin of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

For the first two years after its fall 2003 opening, the curvilinear hall’s dramatic exterior remained dark most nights. But with the start of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new season in late September, that changed.

“The real goal was to give a soft luminescence so that people could see the building at night,” says Music Center spokeswoman Catherine Babcock. The Music Center is absorbing the cost of the illumination, she says, with approval from county officials.

Architect Frank O. Gehry “was in the loop” on the move, Babcock says. In his original design for the building in the late 1980s, Gehry envisioned a stone exterior. He changed to more-affordable stainless steel as cost estimates mounted, but warned in interviews that “a metal building is hard to light at night.” A spokesman in Gehry’s office said last week that he was unavailable to comment on the new lighting.

The array includes 10 lights on the Grand Avenue side of the building and four on the 1st Street side. Though they’ve been in place for nearly two months, Babcock says, many downtown workers didn’t notice them until the end of daylight saving time in late October.