The Art of Warp

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Gehry's first instinct had been to design an auditorium as asymmetrical as the walls outside. But he was concerned that too many strange angles would make people reject the place. "I wanted to give them what I call a handrail, a visual handrail." He means that he designed a comforting, symmetrical interior in cozy Douglas fir, with gentle curves that strongly recall the work of Alvar Aalto, the Finnish architect whose work is one of Gehry's lifelong inspirations. Gehry's multicolored floral-pattern upholstery is another nod to the comfort factor. A tribute to Lillian's love of flowers, those theme-park reds and blues are also an antielitist gesture that's pure Gehry.

At a time when symphony orchestras are losing their audience, no word frightened the supporters of the Disney Hall more than elitism. It was essential to make a place where both Shostokovich and Shrek could feel at home. Disney, who had Leopold Stokowski shake hands on camera with Mickey Mouse, loved classical music, but he loved the public, too. 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 multimultiethnic Los Angeles, a city that doesn't look to Europe for much beyond designer shoes.

"I didn't want to create a pseudo-classical hall for classical music," says Gehry. What he created 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. Even before it opened, the building was becoming the iconographic symbol of a city that until now has had to make do with a big Hollywood sign. A few weeks ago, if you happened to be touring the garden and small outdoor amphitheaters that Gehry has provided at roof level, you might have run across Cindy Crawford doing a fashion shoot. If those Hollywood letters start to crumble again, maybe this time people can just let them fall.