Walt Disney Concert Hall

Frank Gehry's concert hall of billowing stainless-steel curves, home of the LA Philharmonic.

Inside, the hall seats 2,265 people. Its design mixes two seating styles: a vineyard-style layout, where the audience surrounds the stage in terraces, and a more traditional shoebox shape. The acoustics, designed by Minoru Nagata and finished under Yasuhisa Toyota, have been widely praised, and so has the building itself.

How did it start?

In 1987 Lillian Disney, the widow of Walt Disney, gave $50 million as a gift to the people of Los Angeles and as a tribute to her husband's love of the arts and the city. Gehry, who was born and worked in Los Angeles, finished his designs in 1991. Building a huge underground parking garage came first, from 1992 to 1996, and the hall itself was completed in 2003.

Building a hard shape

The hall's tilted, curving walls were too complicated to draw by hand, so Gehry's team used a computer program also used to design French fighter jets. The columns on the north side lean forward by seventeen degrees. The first plan called for a stone skin, but to save money it was swapped for stainless steel.

Work on the hall stalled from 1994 to 1996 because money ran short. It restarted in earnest in 1996, the ground was broken in December 1999, and the final cost was about 274 million dollars.

Why does it look like that?

Gehry shaped the building as a sculpture, with curves that seem to move in the light. He said the angles were meant to suggest musical movement and the motion of Los Angeles.

Both its architecture and its sound have been praised, in contrast to its predecessor in the Music Center, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Before it opened, the orchestra spent the summer of 2003 getting used to the hall.

On the globe

The model shows the silvery, curving steel shapes of the concert hall; look for the swirling metallic walls.