From the Introduction to Symphony in Steel:
The Walt Disney Concert Hall Goes Up
By
Gary Leonard
It all started with nine shovels breaking ground at the corner of First Street and Grand Avenue on December 10, 1992. I shot that groundbreaking and I knew instantly, having seen the design, that I would be compelled to document Disney Hall from that day to its finish. As a photographer of Los Angeles, I’ve shot upwards of a million images of my hometown. My archives are filled with politicians, punk rockers, groundbreakings, cult conventions, political conventions, the famous, infamous and un–famous, neighborhoods, signage, and always architecture in progress and in history.
For decades I have carried with me LACMA’s 1965 edition of David Gebhard and Robert Winter’s A Guide to Architecture in Southern California to really understand my city. But to fully understand Disney Hall, I had to be there from the beginning.
Los Angeles architecture can be audacious, cerebral and impermanent. Nothing is sacred. The city is never in stasis. It’s hyper–kinetic; it doesn’t stay put for more than a second. You could say it’s on photographic time: it can only be captured in the instant it takes to push that button, and then it’s already becoming something else, something unexpected. And it doesn’t care what you think about it. This is what makes Los Angeles so intriguing, infuriating, and haunting, all at the same time. This is what I spend every day trying to capture.
Capturing Disney Hall in progress has been a beautiful thing, despite its false start. What came first, in this city of cars, was the seven’level underground garage with its salmon coat of paint. Everyone was euphoric about what would come next. Then funding dried up and for too long (Frank) Gehry’s dream of Disney Hall was represented only by an underground parking structure. The public had to wonder if Walt Disney Concert Hall would ever be built on Bunker Hill. As the concert hall’s fate grew less clear over the next few years, the city itself didn’t miss a beat. Three mayors spanned those eleven years. Riots ate up neighborhoods, the entrenched media circus of Camp O.J. squatted outside the county courthouse, and the Northridge earthquake collapsed a section of the Interstate 10 and twisted apart the interchange between the I-5 and Highway 14, taking the life of a CHP officer. The Staples Center took exactly one year to construct and became home to the Lakers, who went on victory marches, and to the Clippers, who didn’t. With all this going on, downtown, which had long been abandoned for the suburbs, started waking up again. Grand Avenue became an exemplar of what could be. The design of the controversial new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels ushered in the new millennium. The Metro Blue Line shuttled in people, and the other rail lines were under construction.
Then in 1999, with funds secured, ground was broken for a second time on the 3.6 acre Disney Hall site. This time, once the first steel went up, there was no stopping it. I returned, often daily, and caught the real action: the construction crews negotiating the infrastructure of this unbelievably complex skeleton with its thousands of pieces of steel. The workers were stoked at constructing something that was so challenging that every angle numbered anything but ninety degrees, and yet so playful that it looked like a giant bowl of spaghetti.
For many months mammoth scaffolding flanked the interior. It had to be specifically designed to handle the building of the sixty–foot–high interior space and the weight of up to two tons at a time. Basically, I moved in. I got to know the ironworkers, the truck drivers, the finishing team, even the guy who brought the outhouses to the site each day. These people are Disney Hall, right up there with Frank Gehry and the acousticians Yasuhita Toyota and Minoru Nagata. They all can tell their grandkids, I helped make that. As the ironworkers put their signatures on the final piece of steel in the entryway, they asked me to sign too, and I knew from that gesture that they had accepted me as part of the team. All I had done was click, but that was my job, so I signed. Like all of their names, my signature is now covered with stainless steel. This is history you can’t see once the cladding is in place.
As Disney Hall begins to find itself, downtown Los Angeles is reinventing itself. The place that wasn’t, is. Traffic is giving way to rapid transit, as the Red, Blue, Green and Gold lines of the MTA converge at Union Station. People are moving to upscale lofts in converted office buildings, and yet one of our country’s largest homeless communities lives within view of the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. City Hall has been gloriously returned to its 1928 inaugural condition, but this time with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of unseen seismic safety gear. Other buildings have reshaped the downtown skyline as well: the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, with its all–beige–and–yellow straight edges and vast open spaces; the restored Central Library, previously eaten by flames; the Colburn School of Performing Arts and the environmentally adept CalTrans center that’s underway. But it is Disney Hall that will bring the world to downtown.
When you sit in one of those 2,265 seats at Disney Hall, you won’t fully appreciate the place unless you see what went before. That’s the why of Symphony in Steel. Documenting a building like this, in which each phase of construction completely redirects the skyline, is a once–in–a–lifetime experience. Now the tattooed construction workers have left the site to the tuxedoed musicians of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. One group of artists has made room for another.
Walt Disney Concert Hall is a grand new symbol and it’s on Grand Avenue, just a block away from a Metro Red Line station. It is the crown of the new culturally radiant downtown.
Excerpted with permission from Symphony in Steel, published in September 2003 by Angel City Press.
The Photographer: Gary Leonard is a 30-year photojournalist who calls his beat “all things Southern California.” Take My Picture Gary Leonard, his weekly photo–column, currently appears in Los Angeles CityBeat and Valley CityBeat. His photographs are regularly featured in the L.A. Downtown News and have appeared in publications from Coagula Art Journal to the New York Times. Click here for more on the photographer at his Symphony In Steel web site.
Elsewhere: Visit Disney Hall here. Visit the MOCA exhibit of architect Frank Gehry’s projects. See a slideshow of images from the book here. Buy archival prints from the book here.
Further reading: Iron: Erecting the Walt Disney Concert Hall by Gil Garcetti. The former Los Angeles County District Attorney published his own photography book last year capturing the work of ironworkers who crafted Disney Hall. Read Garcetti’s essay, previously featured at CaliforniaAuthors.com.
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