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GEHRY'S COLLABORATION WITH THE LA PHIL
Focus on Frank
Frank Gehry (1929-2025) developed hundreds of unique architectural projects in his illustrious career. For more than 60 years, he created ambitiously with a seasoned team of innovative minds focused on the future. This exhibition pays homage to Gehry’s decades-long collaboration with the LA Phil, with the most recent major project, the Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center at Inglewood, completed in 2021.
Tracing the arc of this storied partnership, we focus on five career moments: three architectural projects and two other creative endeavors in set design and sculpture. Juxtaposing projects from the early years with his contemporary buildings highlights the evolution of Gehry and the LA Phil’s creative relationship, something that was unique in the history of cultural institutions in this country.
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gehry’s signature work, is flanked by visual outlines of two projects for the LA Phil from contrasting eras: his current design for the Beckmen YOLA Center and his 1970s improvements to the Hollywood Bowl acoustics with “sonotubes” and iconic fiberglass spheres. Interspersed between these architecture-focused sections are the stage design for a Dudamel-led production of Don Giovanni in 2012 and the Blue Ribbon Garden fountain, his witty tribute to Lillian Disney and her love for Delft porcelain and roses.
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Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center
In 2018, Gehry volunteered his services to design the Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood, the first purpose-built facility for YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles), the signature learning program of Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil.
Education fascinated Frank Gehry. In 1968, he volunteered with his sister to teach fifth graders in an L.A. public school how to design an imaginary city using blocks and cardboard, facilitating discussion about urban planning issues. One of his philanthropic projects was Turnaround Arts: California, co-founded by Gehry and Malissa Feruzzi Shriver as a West Coast wing of the Kennedy Center’s national arts education program.
The existing 1960s modernist building that housed a Security Pacific Bank branch was reimagined as a 25,000-square-foot youth orchestra performance hall and rehearsal space. Designed as a glass-fronted box so that a passerby can see in, the Beckmen YOLA Center features a dropped floor and raised ceiling, allowing the orchestra to have 45 feet of space above it for optimal acoustics. The pop-up transparent roof lets sunlight stream into the 260-seat concert hall below. Retractable walls give the building additional flexibility, allowing it to be quickly broken up into concert, rehearsal and teaching sections. The Center is named though a generous contribution from longtime LA Phil supporter and Board Vice Chair Thomas Beckmen and his wife Judy, a director of The Music Center’s Blue Ribbon. The Beckmen YOLA Center opened its doors in the fall of 2021. The Center is named in honor of its lead donors Thomas Beckmen, who served as the LA Phil Board Chair at the time of the Center's opening in 2021, and his wife Judy.
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Set Design for Don Giovanni
In 2012, Gustavo Dudamel started a three-year project with the LA Phil that celebrated the famed collaboration between Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. The project began with the production of Don Giovanni, featuring sets by Frank Gehry, costumes by Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte and stage direction by Christopher Alden.
In typical Gehry fashion, the sets included a beautifully layered and dreamy backdrop of organically crumbled white paper, designed as tiered and movable abstract platforms that he called “moving still life on stage.” White platforms scattered amongst the scrunched-up mounds of paper could be moved to create a huge staircase at the center of the stage. Gehry’s modifications creatively placed the orchestra upstage on raised platform above the action taking place below.
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Walt Disney Concert Hall
It took 16 years from Lillian Disney’s initial gift in 1987 to the time Walt Disney Concert Hall was ready for the public. When it opened in October 2003, it was recognized as an architectural masterpiece and acoustical marvel, forever changing the musical landscape of Los Angeles.
A remarkable work of public architecture, Walt Disney Concert Hall is also one of the most recognized buildings in America. “We essentially designed a structure from the inside to the outside,” Gehry wrote. “In a quest for a synthesis of acoustics and architecture, the solution was a room shaped like a box, but with a sculptural seating arrangement. I likened it to the idea about a boat in a box; hence the evolution of the sailing metaphor. The ceiling started to be shaped like sails, and then, the outside started to be shaped like sails."
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A Rose for Lilly
Designed in the shape of a giant rose, the fountain plays tribute to Lillian Disney and her love for Royal Delft porcelain, gardens and roses.
Frank Gehry was as much an artist as he was an architect. The sculptural style of his buildings was a distinctive feature of his work. Early in his career Gehry created sculptures and furniture using inventive forms made from unexpected materials, such as corrugated cardboard (the Easy Edges and Experimental Edges series of chairs and tables), pliable bentwood (Knoll furniture series), and translucent plastic laminate (ColorCore for a series of lamps).
A Rose for Lilly was one of Frank’s more recent unique projects of this type. Designed in the shape of a giant rose, the fountain plays tribute to Lillian Disney and her love or Royal Delft porcelain, gardens and roses.
The project was overseen by the artist Tomas Osinski, whose job was to translate Gehry’s 14 inch model into an installation measuring 22 feet wide by 17 feet long and 7 feet high. To do so, Osinski assembled a team of eight artists including his wife Ewa Osinska. A rebar skeleton of the rose petals was packed with reinforced concrete and covered in mortar before mosaic work began. The team broke 200 Delft porcelain vases and more than 10,000 tiles to create a quarter-of-a-million fragments, including about 60 hand-painted artistic stamps playfully placed throughout the fountain. A Rose for Lilly is now the highlight in the Blue Ribbon Garden behind Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The team broke 200 Delft porcelain vases and more than 10,000 tiles to create a quarter-of-a-million fragments including about 60 hand-painted artistic stamps playfully placed through the fountain. A Rose for Lilly is now the highlight in the Blue Ribbon Garden behind Walt Disney Concert Hall.
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Sonotubes and Spheres
A friend of the LA Phil’s then-General Manager Ernest Fleischmann, Gehry was first hired by the orchestra in 1970 to solve problematic stage acoustics at the Hollywood Bowl.
Gehry collaborated on this project with acoustician Christopher Jaffe to create a temporary solution in the form of “sonotubes.” Forty-eight industrial grade cardboard tubes, up to 36 feet high and 3 feet wide, lined the Bowl shell, creating “an acoustical stage enclosure." Reinforced by steel and wood and coated with waterproof paint, the sonotubes converted direct sound energy into increased reverberant energy in lower frequencies. They allowed the musicians to hear each other better, while also projecting a more balanced orchestral sound to the audience.
Using these cardboard resonating tubes gave such impressive results that this “temporary” solution, inexpensive and fast to assemble, was in place until 1980 when the sonotubes were replaced by sound spheres, also designed by Frank Gehry.
In another approach to improve the acoustics, this later design of Gehry’s called for 11 fiberglass spheres to be hung within the Bowl shell in a carefully calculated arrangement.