The Walt Disney Concert Hall was designed by Frank Gehry, won in competition in 1988, and opened in 2003 after a long pause for fundraising and the early development of digital design tools. It is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and stands at the corner of Grand Avenue and First Street, directly opposite the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion within the downtown Music Center complex.
The exterior is a composition of curved stainless-steel sails that wrap a vineyard-plan auditorium concealed within. Each panel of the cladding is uniquely shaped to the doubly-curved surface beneath it, and the geometry was developed entirely in three dimensions using Catia, a software package originally written for the design of Dassault aircraft. The building was one of the first major architectural projects to be designed, documented, fabricated, and assembled directly from a computational three-dimensional model, and it marks a turning point in architectural practice. The cladding consists of approximately 6,400 stainless-steel panels supported on a secondary frame attached to the underlying structural steel. The panels were originally finished in mirror-polished steel, but a portion of the surface was sandblasted to a matte finish in 2005 because the polished panels facing certain neighbouring apartments had been reflecting concentrated sunlight onto residents at temperatures sufficient to melt traffic cones in the street below. Inside the steel wrapping, the auditorium itself is a vineyard plan, in which the audience seating wraps around the orchestra in concentric tiers on all sides rather than facing it from one direction. The hall seats 2,265, and the interior surfaces are clad in Douglas fir shaped acoustically by Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics.
The Disney Concert Hall defined Gehry’s mature deconstructivist language and gave downtown Los Angeles a contemporary monument equal in identity to Sydney’s opera house or Bilbao’s Guggenheim (also Gehry). It also legitimised the use of computational design tools at the largest scales of practice.