John Pardey revisits Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, examining its conceptual origins, exuberant material language, and its legacy within a generation shaped by icon-making architecture.
(Credit: Carol M. Highsmith via Wikimedia Commons)
This article is part of a monthly series of short essays on some of the greatest buildings of the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries. Read John Pardey’s introduction to the series here.
Foreword
After news of Gehry’s passing in late 2025, architect Daniel Libeskind commented on his influence to AT: “Frank Gehry should be celebrated for his extraordinary originality. An architect who certainly changed the course of architecture by underlining that it was first an art, and only secondarily a service. He was a friend whose works were always challenging, surprising and provocative.”
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You’ve got to bumble forward into the unknown.”
— Frank Gehry
In 1978, Frank Gehry was standing at the kitchen sink in his newly completed home in Santa Monica when he saw a truck pull up outside. As the window of the truck was lowered, the barrel of a gun appeared and Gehry ducked as the house was shot at.
It was at that point Gehry figured he had done something good. The Dutch Colonial home he occupied had been transformed by wrapping it with distorted forms in glass, plywood, chain-link fencing and corrugated metal, which to the neighbours appeared as if a train had crashed into the building. Gehry’s work continues to be divisive, yet until very recently, he was the most famous living architect in the world.
Gehry’s house in Santa Monica. (Credit: IK’s World Trip via Wikimedia Commons)
With his modest yet wacky house, Gehry set the blueprint for his long career (he died aged 96), always bringing unexpected, evocative and often seductive forms, fused with unconventional materials. While seen as something of a maverick, Gehry’s work is also steeped in history and often cites the likes of Francesco Borromini, the 17th-century Baroque architect who built several dramatic churches in Rome. These were thought eccentric at the time, but now stand as examples of the swirling, inventive High Renaissance period.
Up until the age of fifty, much like Louis Kahn before him, Gehry worked in the commercial sector before he hit his stride, downscaled his office, and followed his heart with an architecture that exuded the invention, joy and freedom fully encapsulated in his home in Santa Monica.
The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. (Credit: r kallerna via Wikimedia Commons)
Despite being commissioned for the Disney Concert Hall earlier, it was the competition-winning design for a new Guggenheim Museum in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao that brought Gehry global fame upon its completion in 1997. This fantastical building: a crumpled, writhing and shimmering edifice in titanium, was to revive the city, launching the term ‘iconic architecture’ into the contemporary vernacular.
Located on the bank of the Nervión River, the Guggenheim Museum was ground-breaking in its architectural expression, going well beyond the work of the Expressionist architects of the early 20th century to create a building more akin to an inhabited abstract sculpture. Looking like a car crash — a jumble of bent, shiny metallic forms — it captured the public imagination. In the first three years after opening, it brought some four million visitors to the city, significantly transforming the local economy and triggering what is now known as ‘the Bilbao Effect’.
Entrance to the Walt Disney Concert Hall. (Credit: Giuseppe Milo via Wikimedia Commons)
In Los Angeles, the Disney Concert Hall was subject to an international competition that saw James Stirling, Gottfried Böhm and Hans Hollein reach the final shortlist. Gehry’s proposal was unconventional, comparable to Walt Disney’s films in its combination of serious themes with wonder and delight — an approach that helped him win the commission.
Commissioned by Walt Disney’s widow, Lillian, who donated $50 million in memory of her husband, with further support from the city in the form of land and additional funding, the concert hall would end up being sixteen years in the making.
Despite enduring battles with clients and funders, Gehry’s intent remained clear: “I wanted the building to be friendly, to express joy, and to be engaging to the community,” he said.
The design, while challenging, was based on a logical plan. The north and west sides of the Downtown LA block were edged by office space in conventional, stone-clad, three- and four-storey, well-mannered buildings, while to the south and east was a playground for the community, complete with a large garden and a broad plaza.
(Credit: Geographer via Wikimedia Commons)
At the heart of the plan, set on a diagonal, lay the concert hall itself: a rectangular ‘box’ formed from playful curved forms, seating 2,265 people around the orchestra. Perhaps learning from the poor acoustics of the Sydney Opera House — designed after Utzon had departed the project — Gehry took the technical performance of the hall extremely seriously, working closely with acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota from Tokyo, a leader in the field.
The hall features a billowing timber ceiling clad in Douglas fir and curved bay seating on all sides, echoing Hans Scharoun’s ground-breaking ‘music at the centre’ Philharmonie in Berlin (1963). At the centre stands a reimagined organ with square-shaped pipes — colloquially known as ‘French fries’ — that reach up to the ceiling in a clustered formation.
The dramatic concert hall interior. (Credit: Daniel Hartwig via Wikimedia Commons)
Entering Gehry’s playground via a small plaza in the south-eastern corner, wrapped by metal-clad, petal-shaped walls, visitors emerge into a vast lobby populated by free-form stairs, ramps, service pods and giant structural ‘trees’ (steel clad in timber). The building accommodates a chamber music hall, café, bookshop, bars and library, all swirling around the central concert hall over four levels. On the ground floor, a bright floral design dedicated to Lillian Disney provides a colourful, carpet-like floor plane, also echoed in the concert hall seating.
The second floor becomes a raised city park and garden, complete with an outdoor amphitheatre, with the concert hall bursting through the middle like a giant metal-clad flower. These free-forms were originally intended to be clad in stone – Gehry famously claiming that ‘at night stone would glow’ – but after Bilbao, the funders were persuaded by metal, this time stainless steel rather than titanium.
As with Utzon’s shells in Sydney, the free-forms posed significant challenges in modelling and structural calculation. Gehry therefore collaborated with the French aerospace company Dassault Aviation, using its CATIA (Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application) software to pioneer the templating of each panel, no two of which were the same.
(Credit: r Ashim D’Silva via Wikimedia Commons)
(Credit: Brandon Smith via Wikimedia Commons)
Once complete, the metal-clad form created localised parabolic mirror effects, heating nearby apartments and creating street-level hot spots — some reaching 60 degrees — while also blinding passing motorists with glare. Subsequent computer analysis identified the offending panels, which were then sanded to dull their lustre.
The concert hall ended up costing a total of $276M – roughly the same as a modern Airbus A330 aircraft. Gehry’s building is wilful, wacky and wild: a work of pure expression with little regard for efficiency, using vastly more steel than structurally necessary in order to bend matter to the will of form.
It is the product of Gehry’s individual mind, and not necessarily something to be learned from. And it may be the antithesis of a building such as Mies’ Nationalgalerie in Berlin, with its architecture honed down to the essential, the structure pure and irreducible. But like the churches of Borromini, its vibrant audacity brings joy and delight – surely one of the hallmarks of a truly successful building.
