Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall

The Vision

In 1987, the late Lillian Disney made an initial gift of $50 million to build a world-class performance venue as a gift to the people of Los Angeles and a tribute to Walt Disney's devotion to the arts. Since then, other gifts and accumulated interest bring the Disney family's total contribution to over $100 million. The County of Los Angeles agreed to provide the land and significant additional funding to finance Walt Disney Concert Hall's six-level subterranean parking garage.(Duffy,25)

In 1988, renowned architect Frank Gehry was selected to design the complex, whose final shape he unveiled in 1991. The County initiated construction of the parking garage in 1992, completing it in 1996. Construction on the Concert Hall itself began in November 1999. Also that year, the Music Center launched a capital campaign to complete the construction funding. Many corporate, foundation, and individual partners, along with the State of California, have contributed generously to the campaign due to the remarkable leadership of Andrea L. Van de Kamp, Chairman of the Music Center, Eli Broad, Chairman of SunAmerica, Inc., and former Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan. (Nobel,59)

The Los Angeles Philharmonic provided additional funding for the core project and full funding for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Center.It's often said that good things come to those who wait, and for those of us who have long been waiting for the completion of the Walt Disney Concert Hall Organ are finally going to get our just desserts. After a year of installation, tuning, and voicing the 6,134-pipe organ is ready to make its debut to kick off what promises to be an excellent 2004/2005 concert season for the LA Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall starting Thursday, September 30.

History

The hall was conceived by Lillian Disney in 1987 as a tribute to her married man, Walt, in supplement to supplying a new dwelling for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Now in any Disney topic reserve travel, the article habitually begins out joyously but shortly certain thing proceeds awfully, awfully wrong. And so it was with the roller-coaster annals of how the Walt Disney Concert Hall eventually came to be completed.Mrs. Disney primarily pledged $50 million in the direction of the building of the live presentation hall—a gigantic allowance to be sure—but by the end of the building, the last cost totaled a $274 million rather than of $100 million as initially estimated.(Duffy,25)

Once Frank Gehry was chosen as the head architect and the suggested designs submitted in 1991, the task smashed ground in 1992. Unfortunately, a enterprise recession deepened and, connected with the after-effects of the Rodney King riots in 1992, charges for the task started to increase as Gehry reworked his architectural designs to accommodate conceive changes.Gehry, by this time no outsider to employed on Disney projects—his conceive firm, Gehry Partners, conceived in 1995 the Team Disney Administration Building and the Disney ICE skating rink in Anaheim—was accomplishing a alike task in Bilbao, Spain, that acquired him world-wide acclaim.By 1995, the ...