A pet project of architect Frank Gehry, a smaller concert hall to complement his legendary Walt Disney Concert Hall, is taking shape in downtown Los Angeles for an opening next September.
Elements Gehry devised to set it apart are already visible, as construction on the $337-million addition to the Colburn School of Performing Arts reveals details the architect conceived years ago.
The centerpiece of the expansion will be a 1,000-seat concert hall named for Pasadena philanthropists Terri and Jerry Kohl with an in-the-round design meant to create intimacy between the performers and the audience. The hall will include an orchestra pit and a stage similar in size to the one at Disney Hall so it can accommodate grand orchestra, opera and dance performances.
The Colburn Center, still under construction, in downtown Los Angeles last week.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Gehry set out to create an immersive hall that would inspire artists and envelop the audience, said Meaghan Lloyd, his chief of staff and right-hand at his firm, Gehry Partners.
“Frank’s passion was bringing the audience closer to the performers and getting the relationship between the two just right, so that the audience can feel the performers, the performers can feel the audience reacting,” Lloyd said.
Kohl Hall will be part of the school where Colburn’s symphony orchestra, bands, youth string programs and children’s choirs will perform. It will also be available for rent for outside productions such as jazz and classical music concerts. It is expected to be in use more than 200 times a year.
Architect Frank Gehry with a model of his design for an addition for Colburn School.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
The hall will open with a concert on Sept. 25, the Colburn School announced Tuesday. The weekend celebration will include inaugural performances at the Dance Center, a new dance instruction and performance venue being built as part of the 100,000-square-foot Gehry-designed addition.
The new Dance Center will double facilities for the school’s Trudl Zipper Dance Institute. The dance facilities will include a 100-seat theater for dance and four professional-size studios for dance instruction and rehearsal.
Beginning next year, the hall will be the home of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, a group of professional musicians about half the size of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. LACO concerts will feature premieres of new fanfares by celebrated film composers, including a work by John Williams to be performed at LACO’s inaugural concert in the hall.
The fanfares are curated by Grammy nominee and singer Seth MacFarlane, best known as the creator and star of “Family Guy.”
Meaghan Lloyd, chief of staff and partner at Gehry Partners, left, and Sel Kardan, president and chief executive of the Colburn School, look over construction of the Terri and Jerry Kohl Hall.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Part of the hall’s commercial appeal is expected to be its size, in a sweet spot between the 2,265-seat Disney and the popular 415-seat Herbert Zipper Concert Hall already on the Colburn campus. The nearby Dorothy Chandler Pavilion seats about 3,200 guests. The Peacock Theater at L.A. Live seats 7,100.
Kohl Hall’s in-between size “is the missing piece of the venue puzzle” for Los Angeles, Colburn President Sel Kardan said.
A key feature already in place, hanging from the ceiling, is an array of steel clouds packed with concrete, designed to improve acoustics and evoke a sense of airiness. The clouds were made in the Netherlands by a firm with a history of building steel ship hulls that now specializes in building complex steel constructions like the clouds using digital data.
Visitors stand underneath concrete sound clouds designed to improve acoustics.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The exterior metal cladding of the addition features a luminescent pink paint coating called Pink Kandi.
Japanese acoustical engineer Yasuhisa Toyota will serve as the hall’s acoustician, as he has for all of Gehry’s concert halls, beginning with Disney Hall.
The long-awaited Colburn School addition will be the third Gehry-designed building on Bunker Hill, which already has Disney Concert Hall and the Grand LA, a $1-billion apartment, hotel and retail complex he designed for New York mega-developer Related Cos.
The Colburn School dates to 1950 and moved to its current location downtown in 1998, where it has more than 2,000 students, most of whom range from middle school to college age.