When the Walt Disney concert hall opens for its first public performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in October, its architect, Frank Gehry, should experience a final pang of bittersweet satisfaction. Glimmering on the intersection of 1st Street and Grand Avenue, Disney Hall is Gehry's homecoming-the first great public building he has made for the city that made him. It is arguably a more dramatic achievement even than his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Its early designs predate the Bilbao building by several years, marking it out as perhaps the true blueprint of his mature style.
For 15 tormented years, Disney Hall has endured a storm of walkouts, personal betrayals, financial disasters, political recrimination and repeated redesigns. Now that it is nearly ready, it looks like a silver galleon under sail. In the evenings, its billowing steel sheets refract pink and orange light through the architectural desolation of downtown LA. It creates sightlines angled inwards onto the flowing, wood-panelled concert hall at its heart, and outwards over the city. It is an astonishing object, and it marks the first public acceptance of Gehry by Los Angeles, the home town which he feels has been rejecting him for a lifetime.
Yet, while Gehry's greatest ambitions have at last come home to roost in America, his attention will continue to be fixed on Europe, where much of his most important work has developed. Come September, in the dour, post-industrial surroundings of Dundee, a more modest Gehry project will reach completion. Far from the gaze of the world's architectural establishment, this is a small but intensely personal building-his "Maggie's Centre"-a place where cancer patients undergoing treatment in the nearby oncology unit can come for refuge and counselling. It is Gehry's first British building, designed as a memorial to his friend, the Scottish designer Maggie Keswick Jencks, who died of cancer in 1995. He has envisaged it as a small lighthouse standing under the dim shadow of Dundee's Ninewell's hospital and, albeit far away and on an intimate scale, it too takes him back to the roots of his Los Angeles architecture.
Like no other living architect, Frank O Gehry embodies the idea of the contemporary masterpiece. His architecture springs from the high traditions of the 20th century, yet he has recast the elite impersonality of modernism into a joyous and accessible expressionism. He is the defining architect of the software age, yet he deeply mistrusts the cold touch of computer design. His Bilbao Guggenheim is one of most recognised structures in the world and a key reference in current debates over the state and meaning of architecture. Yet Gehry himself remains an oddly embattled figure. Almost every commission represents some kind of fight for him, and he is not an architect for whom winning comes casually. When he talks, he has a habit of shrugging off his own stories, as if uncertain which would be the greater effort-to remember something, or to forget it. He calls himself "the luckiest guy on earth," but has a habit of dwelling on setbacks: rivals who have belittled his work, critics who have underrated him, his problems with New York.
At the age of 74, Gehry declares himself proud of still feeling "unresolved." It is a feeling he associates with creative activity. Every project represents an effort to forge a meaningful relationship with a client, and if that relationship doesn't work, the building won't either. From his first dream of a building, to his spaghetti-like drawings of it, to his repeated resculpting of models, and even to the scanning of designs onto a computer (which he finds most painful of all), Gehry clings to his struggles.
I meet up with Gehry in his new studio, a simple white warehouse space in an anonymous block of industrial parkland near the ocean in Los Angeles. Gehry's staff are clustered around models of buildings for Washington DC, Jerusalem, Ontario, Chicago, Venice, Panama and Massachusetts. In one corner, drawing no particular attention to itself, stands the famous Catia computer system, originally created to design French Mirage jets, but used now by Gehry to construct complicated, bendy buildings at little more cost than ones made out of straight lines. Gehry's office is an informal partition off from the main studio. As I walk in, he looks up from his desk and hands me a letter. "Whaddya think of that?" he asks. The letter has been co-signed by Gehry's big east coast architectural rivals, Richard Meier and Peter Eisenman. "Dear Frank," it begins. "You are a prick."
This turns out to be a new volley in a skirmish which began over the competition to rebuild on ground zero, in which Eisenman and Meier were co-participants. Gehry himself had put forward no proposal of his own and, when asked by the New York Times what he thought of the designs which were submitted, he said that the architects were being underpaid for their work. The remark sparked outrage. All he meant, he says, was that the $40,000 on offer wouldn't have covered the basic costs of such complex proposals. But it marked a low point in his relationship with New York and offered the city's architects the perfect opportunity to tell an LA interloper to stay off their turf.
Much of the animus against Gehry dates back to the 1997 opening of the Bilbao Guggenheim, which, at a relatively modest cost of $100m, won him world fame and some big enemies. At around the same time, Richard Meier's Getty museum was completed in LA, at the more substantial cost of $1bn. This, too, was designed to be the world's pre-eminent new art gallery. But Meier's great white Getty was largely ignored in a sudden mania for weekend trips to a little town in northern Spain, glinting with Gehry's titanium panels. Ever since, bitterness has marked relations between the two silver-haired architects.
Gehry says he has become wearied by his fights with New York. Three years ago, he walked out on a competition he was set to win to build new offices for the New York Times. More recently, he heard that Meier had been bad-mouthing his designs for another Guggenheim in Manhattan, and that project too has had the plug pulled on it. But Gehry tells me that, contrary to accusations of his lack of concern, he had in fact put together some of his own ideas for the World Trade Centre site. Inspired by Mayor Giuliani's call for a "soaring" public space, he took some students to visit the Hagia Sofia mosque in Istanbul, in which Christian and Muslim symbols have, over centuries of occupation and counter-occupation, mingled together. On the basis of this visit, Gehry imagined replacing ground zero with a similarly temple-like enclosure, but of parkland-an alternative to Central park, somewhere that people who had lost loved ones would come to feel life returning. He won't say what he thinks about the Daniel Libeskind plans which won the ground zero commission. But Gehry does express discomfort with the idea of architectural memorial. "In 100 years' time, even the Vietnam war memorial will not have the same amount of people visiting it. A memorial of a great thinker or a president can have meaning over many years, but a memorial of war or disaster doesn't have the same longevity."
Gehry and Libeskind have much in common. They both lost family in the Holocaust; they have both found acceptance late in their careers; and they both produce eccentrically sculpted buildings-whose purpose, on one level at least, is personal expression. But Gehry recoils from the tragic worldview which Libeskind articulates. "My tendency is to make architecture that expresses joy," Gehry has said. "Architecture that expresses anger or hatred is alien to me."
In the squawl over his WTC remark, what really got to Gehry was the accusation that he was only interested in the money. What in fact interests him is the client. Gehry's definition of a good client is one who engages with him creatively in the process of designing a building. The cash has to be there to build it, of course, but the energy and intricacies of the relationship always take precedence over financial issues. In 1998, the Las Vegas billionaire Steve Wynn offered him a $1bn commission for a hotel-casino complex in Atlantic City. "I'm happy," Wynn reportedly said to him (awed by the Bilbao Guggenheim), "I've found my architect." Gehry, for whom feelings about his partners in design are always personal, replied: "Steve, I don't think I've found my client." And if Gehry can turn down a man with a billion dollars on the table, he is also capable of working for no fee at all, which is what he has done with his Maggie's Centre in Dundee.
Maggie Keswick Jencks, the wife of the architect and critic Charles Jencks, struggled with cancer for seven years before her death in 1995. Towards the end of her life, she began fundraising for a series of cancer centres, which would act as annexes to mainstream oncology units and offer refuge from the grim corridors of the NHS. In a remarkable manifesto entitled A View from the Front Line, she described her experience of dying and analysed institutional approaches to her disease, both in America and Britain. The problem in Britain, she found, was not the treatment of cancer-which, in medical terms, can be world class-so much as the treatment of patients, who are herded through the system like bewildered sheep at the dip. Maggie's manifesto set out not to attack the state of the British system but to propose a supplementary service. This would come in the form of small, almost domestic centres on hospital grounds, where the dying and convalescing could get detailed technical information, complementary treatments and a human response to their condition. "What matters," Maggie wrote, "is not to lose the joy of living in the fear of dying."
Gehry got to know Maggie in the late 1970s, when her husband, Charles, was theorising the funky, "cheapskate" or "adhoc" architecture found in the Venice and Santa Monica districts of LA. These buildings were meant to be fun, intimate and slightly crazy. They achieved an individuality that spurned the intellectual games of postmodernism. Gehry was already friends with Charles, but when he met Maggie he developed an even deeper friendship with her. Jencks has a breezy explanation for the emotional attachment his wife inspired in Gehry: "Frank often has intense relationships with women where he rather puts them on a pedestal, and especially with Maggie because she came from a background which he found interesting."
Gehry, a Canadian Jew from a tough, working-class background-"little Frankie Toronto," as Jencks referred to him in our conversation-was bewitched by this aristocratic British lady, who had been brought up in Scotland and the far east and called herself a "Catholic Buddhist." The Keswick family had been in trade in China for 150 years and, by marrying into the Jardine family, became taipans of the Jardine Matheson company, which virtually ran Hong Kong.
Gehry himself is not shy about expressing his attraction to Maggie. "Here's this fancy lady from Britain," he says, "with family titles and all that stuff, which I was susceptible to because of my upbringing, right?" Maggie, warm and at ease with the world and carrying a mixed fragrance of exoticism and old-world establishment, came into Gehry's anxious, ambitious, LA life. She moved effortlessly into his circle of Californian artists and architects and opened up a different world for him. "Maggie was a lady: she was kind," he explains, "and she had a way of making you feel a part of..." His sentence trails off. Feeling part of things does not come instinctively to Gehry.
What Gehry in turn showed Maggie, Jencks says, was artistic freedom. Before being exposed to his LA scene, she was a fairly conventional painter and designer. But the connection to LA inspired her to throw off her aesthetic conservatism. When she met Gehry, he was on the brink of achieving major breakthroughs in his own style. In 1989, he had found the perfect client: a fabulously wealthy, freewheeling Cleveland businessman called Peter Lewis who was willing to provide Gehry with the money and time to experiment freely. Many leading American architects, including Philip Johnson, were invited to participate on the Lewis house and, in the early 1990s, Gehry asked Maggie to design the garden.
Gehry had just begun to use computer-assisted design and the multiform shapes this allowed him to produce were like nothing the architectural world had seen before. Maggie joked that the bizarre structure of the Lewis house resembled a series of internal organs. What she came up with in response, were a series of red and blue fibreoptic rills which would act like veins and arteries into the stomach of Gehry's design. The experiment lasted nine years and, merely at the modelling stage, cost millions of dollars. The eventual cost of the building would have been $82m, and the project was abandoned. But it became a laboratory of ideas for Gehry. The moulding of the skin of those lurid designs led to some of the large-scale sculpting he would later put into Disney Hall and the Bilbao Guggenheim.
Maggie had already suffered her first bout of cancer by the time she came to work on the Lewis house, but it was only after her death that Gehry was approached by Maggie's partner on the programme, Marcia Blakenham. The first Maggie's Centre was completed in the grounds of Edinburgh's Western General Hospital in 1996. More recently, another has opened in Glasgow. With Charles Jencks pulling in contacts for further designs, the programme of Maggie's Centres has developed a remarkable list of international architects, with Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Richard Rogers designing them on various British sites. This is not merely celebrity gloss on a fundraising process. The centres address an acute kind of architectural puzzle: how to express intimate humanity in a building.
At a cost of around ?1.3m, Gehry's first British building is not expensive. But it wasn't a job he simply rustled up quickly on the side as a favour to friends. When Jencks saw the initial designs, he was stunned. "This is going to be your Ronchamp," he said. It was, perhaps, the wrong thing to say to Gehry. Le Corbusier's legendary French chapel at Ronchamp is the holy grail of fine-scale architecture, the most revered work of sculpted concrete in the world. For Gehry, the notion that he might be aiming at that pitch of intellectual and artistic ambition set alarm bells ringing. Furthermore, though Jencks had latterly become a champion of his work, in the early days he was one of those critics that Gehry felt hadn't taken him seriously. ("I had my eye off the ball," Jencks concedes. "It's always a mistake to underestimate your close friends.") Possibly, old feelings of rejection were playing their role: Gehry threw out the designs for his "Ronchamp." As Jencks adds, with a sigh: "Every time I put Frank on a pedestal, he jumps off it."
Gehry then went into a long period of struggle over the building and, in the middle of his crisis, he had a dream about Maggie. "Which is what I often do," he explains. "I did the same thing tearing down the interiors of my own house; I think one works it out in one's psyche. So Maggie came to me in a dream and said: 'Frank, it's a bit over the top. Calm it down.'" Gehry was identifying Maggie as the creative partner for his building. "I don't believe in the supernatural," he smiles. "But I do believe in the client."
After that, Gehry went on to produce model after model for the centre, eventually fixing on two key images: at one corner, an entrance-way like a lighthouse and, for the roof of the main body of the building, a series of corrugations based on a shawl worn by a woman in a Vermeer portrait, who reminded him of Maggie. In the end, Gehry brought the tone of the building down from the spiritual high notes of a Ronchamp to the gentle intimacies of a place where people could come for a cup of tea and a cry.
In the human intimacy of its scale, Frank Gehry's tribute to Maggie Keswick Jencks suggests a direct bloodline with his Venice and Santa Monica work of the 1970s. At that time, he was preoccupied by the creation of eccentric domestic architecture. Gehry would often use cheap materials, evoking the poor, the ugly and the lowbrow. Yet his Maggie Centre shows how far Gehry's style of studied informality has travelled in its search for formal coherence. And the Disney Hall is evidence that an architecture of expressive idiosyncrasy can be elevated-in the city which made that style possible-to a monumental, public scale.
Yet it was in a European city, and not in LA, that his mature work first emerged. When the Bilbao Guggenheim was completed in 1997, he found himself in a position held by no architect since Michelangelo: Gehry began to be celebrated not only as the world's master builder, but its master artist as well. This was disturbingly close to the ideal Gehry first nurtured as a young, commercial architect in LA, where he started his own studio in 1962, building offices and malls. In pursuit of greater fulfilment, he took refuge in the city's small, somewhat introverted art scene. He hung out with countercultural figures such as Ed Moses, Robert Irwin and Ron Davis, emulating and envying their creative freedom. Gehry, with characteristic bathos, now describes the role he played within 1970s LA culture as that of a "gaga sycophant to the art world." Few of his friends expected him to emerge as the biggest name in the city and, when he did, some felt exploited by him.
But what does it mean to describe a building, however remarkable, as "art"? It is this idea, of architecture as a form of personal expression, that enrages Gehry's critics. Even friends of Gehry, such as the sculptor Richard Serra, have mocked him for his claim that 15 per cent of architecture is an art. Intellectual critics of his work, like Princeton art professor Hal Foster, go so far as to denounce the excess of "signature" in Gehry buildings as an abuse of the nature of architecture. Foster refers to a "disconnection between skin and structure" in Gehry's work, meaning that the external shapes of his buildings have no significant relationship with their internal construction. If, claims Foster, architecture is not constrained by a "formal articulation derived from a resistant material, structure or context," then it becomes "arbitrary or self-indulgent." An obvious case in point is Gehry's pop-imagistic Chiat/Day/Mojo office in Venice, LA, the fa?e of which was designed by the sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen as a giant pair of binoculars.
But Hal Foster's accusation fails to take into account the context out of which Gehry's architecture grew, which is the linear sprawl of LA. On a grand scale, the city is shaped by a superstructural grid of roads and freeways, but it is otherwise characterised by an architectural heterogeneity that is, depending on your point of view, either intoxicating or horrible. LA's vernacular form is the bungalow, a building type to which you can do almost anything. Down on the boardwalk of Venice Beach is a building Gehry once called his "pride and joy." This is a little three-storey house built in the early 1980s for the Norton family, residents of a neighbourhood once famous for its artists and hippies. Even here, Gehry's building stands out as an eccentricity. Out front, there's a cabin raised up on a single stilt, overlooking the ocean like a lifeguard's watchtower. Venice is peppered with early Gehry buildings and they all seem to say: in this place, you can get away with it.
But Gehry's ambitions would never have been satisfied by merely getting away with it. He views his hometown not simply as an arena of licence, but as a specific architectural problem. And it is a sufficiently universal problem for him to tackle it everywhere he builds. He describes LA as the "frontline of a democratic city, with all the freedoms that democracy allows, which has created a chaotic mess." Gehry has never written a manifesto or articulated anything resembling a theory of his buildings, but their shapes are best understood as an attempt to articulate and synthesise the chaos of democratic cities.
Gehry's own explanation for his buildings is an image so apparently gnomic that it only deepens the disdain of his critics. He describes them as "fish." The skin of a fish neither articulates nor implies the shape of its internal organs. Yet a fish can be beautiful, it is certainly adapted to fit its environment, and its skin serves to keep the organism dynamically coherent. The idea of fish, he says, is an expression of his anger at the pointless historical references of postmodernism. Why just go back to Greek temples, he asks, when you can go back to fish, which are 100m years old?
It was while designing a monumental fish sculpture for the Barcelona Olympic village in 1992 that Gehry first employed a computer in the building process, driven by the need to put together a complex, curvilinear structure. Gehry uses computer-assisted design not to create his models, which are hand-crafted, but to provide precise construction specifications for their asymmetrical forms. His studio is filled, not with gizmos, but with almost childlike building blocks. Every model goes through a painstaking series of redesigns, starting with his frenetic and dream-like line drawings, which are translated into an architectural context. Blocks of wood and pieces of metal and plastic are worked and reworked within detailed maps of a location. Only then does Gehry put the Catia program into action. Catia distinguishes between each different material and translates the overall form of a model into a three dimensional image. Thereafter, modifying that image is, for Gehry, the most painful part of his design process. He finds it excruciating to look at computer simulations of his materials and textures, stripped of their sensuality. That is how Gehry's "fish" become buildings.
The fish idea also stands as a neat cryptogram of Gehry's childhood. He was born in Canada in 1929 and spent his early years in a working-class neighbourhood of Toronto. Later, the family moved to what was then a goldmining town in eastern Ontario, called Timmins. His father, Irving, supplied local bars with slot machines and pinball games. The family name was not in fact Gehry, but Goldberg, and Frank Owen Goldberg was the only Jewish boy in his school. There he acquired the nicknames Fishhead and Fishface and was beaten up regularly. In what has become the most emblematic anecdote about Gehry's childhood, his maternal grandmother would keep live carp in the bathtub, for gefilte fish on Fridays. And it was with her that he would build little houses and cities out of scraps from his grandfather's hardware store. In 1997, Gehry told the New Yorker: "That's what I remembered, years later, when I was struggling to find out what I wanted to do in life."
The family moved back to Toronto when slot machines were made illegal and Irving Goldberg set up a furniture business. In 1947, in the midst of a violent argument with Frank, Irving suffered a non-fatal heart attack. The furniture business went bust and the Goldbergs moved to LA. Frank spent seven years as a truck driver, putting himself through architecture school at the University of Southern California. When he married his first wife, Anita, she was unhappy with the name Goldberg and, in 1954, just before graduating at the top of his class, Frank changed his surname to the less obviously Jewish Gehry. The new name had been chosen by Anita and her mother. But he got to keep the initials he liked: FOG.
In the early 1970s, Gehry's marriage to Anita, by whom he had two children, began to break down. When a beautiful and witty Panamanian woman, named Berta Aguilera, came to work as a secretary in his office, they fell in love. Gehry was initially wary of having more children, and the relationship nearly foundered as a result. However, in a turn of events worthy of the spirit of LA, Gehry's analyst, Milton Wexler, brokered a deal with Berta, in which Gehry agreed to have children-but only two, and only as long as Berta took responsibility for the children's upbringing.
It was Berta who pushed Gehry to undertake his most famous experiment in domestic architecture. In Gehry lore, the reconstruction of his own home is the moment his true architectural style was born. In 1978, he took his bland Santa Monica house and, leaving the frame of the original, surrounded it with a new building, constructed from the random materials he could see in the block around him. Like any neighbourhood in suburban LA (essentially, LA is suburbia), there was no correlation between the jumble of housing styles in the area. Gehry set out to accommodate the chaos. Initially, local residents, themselves living in often tasteless pastiches of various architectural periods, were outraged at Gehry's chain-link, plywood and corrugated metal hybrid. Now, however, visitors come on pilgrimage to the oddly harmonious construction, still inhabited by Frank and Berta.
Gehry may resist the temptation to feel that his life and career are reaching resolution, but events appear to be coming full circle regardless. If Disney Hall is settling Gehry's accounts with LA, other buildings are making similar settlements for him around the world. Having long borne the embarrassment of changing his name to make it sound less Jewish, Gehry says construction of his Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem is allowing him to give open expression to his Jewishness. In Panama, his Museum of Biodiversity is underway, courtesy of Berta's origins. Meanwhile, in Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario overlooks some of Gehry's own childhood haunts in central Toronto.
Last November, Jean Chr?en, the prime minister of Canada, offered to reinstate Gehry's Canadian citizenship. While giving his vows of allegiance, it dawned on Gehry that one of these would have to be to Queen Elizabeth II. It was a moment which played directly into his old anxieties about class-his oscillating aspirations to and rejection of it. Laughing, Gehry tells me that he and Maggie had shared a running joke about how he would one day get a knighthood. Yet the real battle of his career has been with a more professional issue of authority-that of the architect. For a man who has spent much of his life in therapy, it is no surprise that he puts this in psychoanalytic terms. The architect, he argues, has been "infantilised" by his relationships to clients and commissioning bodies, whose hands are on the purse strings. The architect can only take control, and become more "parental," if he is able to express a personal vision and simultaneously remain in command of his budget. Using a computer is not merely about creating expressive forms, it is about providing the precisely costed specifications which will assert Gehry's technical and financial authority, allowing him to call the creative shots. "You need to get the construction industry behind you," he says. "That's my passion."
No struggle to prove his authority to the tough guys of construction has been as hard fought as Gehry's slow victory over Disney Hall. In the foreword he has written to a book of photographs chronicling the elevation of the building, Gehry eulogises the LA steelworkers whose labour forged its earthquake-resistant structure. Yet Disney Hall has been formed out of his most delicate aesthetic notions. Gehry describes the effect of the 2,265-seat auditorium at its centre as "psycho-acoustic." Its wood panelling swerves upwards to the higher reaches of the space creating a visual analogue for the movement of sound waves. With the blessing of the LA Philharmonic, Gehry and Yasuhisa Toyota, the consultant acoustician, decided not to provide a system of movable panels, as many modern concert halls do, since orchestras largely ignore such "tuning." Disney Hall's interior was given fixed specifications, allowing Gehry to design it with unbroken elegance. The idea of waves also allowed him to develop the metaphor of a ship, the ceiling being shaped like sails. From there, the fanning out of the building's exterior sheets makes sense. "Because the focal point of the building is the concert hall itself, we designed the structure from the inside to the outside," Gehry writes in the book of the building.
But it very nearly wasn't Gehry's building at all. Richard Koshalek, chairman of the committee charged with finding an architect for Disney Hall, was approached the day before the final selection was made in 1988. "We got a visit from a civic leader," Koshalek tells me, "and he said, 'whatever you do you can't select Frank Gehry, because we can't have a chain-link, plywood, corrugated metal concert hall.'" Gehry was only selected after the committee threatened to go public if their decision wasn't honoured.
The whole project had been made possible by an initial donation of $50m from Walt Disney's widow, Lillian-the largest single gift for a cultural building in US history. But by 1994, financial crises, arguments within the client committee, political atrophy in LA's city hall and mistakes in the drawings meant that Disney hall was no more than a huge hole with underground parking that had already cost $80m.
The project had turned into Gehry's ultimate nightmare: dealing with a multiheaded client with whom he could not form a creative partnership or assert his authority. In this case, the client was made up of various constituencies: the LA Philharmonic, the county of LA, the board of the Music Centre and the Disney Hall committee. Gehry had initially been forced to hand over the job of producing working drawings to an-other firm, because his staff of 30 was not trusted with the construction drawings for a job of this size. He himself picked a practice run by an old friend, Dan Dworsky, to do the drawings. But when, after over two years, Dworsky's firm failed to produce workable specifications, Dworsky publicly blamed Gehry, declaring Disney Hall impossible to build.
Salvation came in 1996 from the LA real estate billionaire and art collector, Eli Broad. He went to see the Bilbao Guggenheim and declared it a masterpiece. The LA press-notably the LA Times's architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff-was also beginning to argue that Disney Hall must not be abandoned, and that Gehry's was the right design. Simultaneously, Koshalek was organising an exhibition of Gehry's models and drawings for Disney Hall, to rustle up support.
Broad, who had ambitions to become a kind of cultural czar for the city, got together with LA mayor Richard Riordan to raise the extra $170m needed to get Disney Hall back on track. This was despite the fact that Broad and Gehry had once fallen out badly over a house that Gehry was meant to have designed for Broad. Accepting Broad as the saviour of Disney Hall was a bitter pill Gehry had to swallow. But then Broad himself took the decision to bring on other firms to complete the design, relegating Gehry to a consulting role. It was a dramatic echo of the denouement in their argument over Broad's own house. Gehry threatened to resign from the project and considered leaving LA altogether. It was at this point that the Disney family made another crucial intervention. Diane Disney Miller was furious that her - and her mother Lillian's - faith in Gehry was being traduced. She arranged for dedicated funds from the family to pay Gehry's office to complete the working drawings. "We promised LA a Frank Gehry building," Disney-Miller said. "And that's what we intend to deliver."
Richard Koshalek still sounds breathless with excitement, 15 years after he chaired the committee which first chose Gehry as Disney Hall's architect. ?It was destined to happen, otherwise how did it happen, with so many forces against it?" The trouble all along, Koshalek believes, was LA's cultural inferiority complex, its fear of embracing a transformative creative act. "This was a city based on aviation and the film industry, real estate and oil. It had financial strength and big characters, but it always had a problem accepting its creative people. Frank was the outsider here. His reputation had to rebound from Europe through Bilbao and back to the US before LA would recognise him."
"Los Angeles," Koshalek pronounces with evangelical zeal, "is the metropolis of the 21st century. But deep down the leadership of the city never believed that. They always found it to be inferior to New York, London, Paris. They never saw its uniqueness as something to draw strength from and build on. Architects like Gehry see it differently. They have always felt that there was something in the psyche of LA that gave greater freedom, greater room for experimentation, greater room for the individual."
Koshalek argues that, after the second world war, LA began to turn away from the idea of civic culture, abandoning downtown as a centre and beginning its long dispersal into a seemingly unstoppable suburbia. But now a new generation of immigrants are asserting themselves, particularly those from Latin American and Asia, who come with ingrained assumptions about the need for public space. Bolstered by growing public transport links, Koshalek says a new political leadership is coming to understand that downtown has the opportunity to rediscover itself as a centre.
"Los Angeles is changing from a suburban culture to an urban culture," says Koshalek. "The city can no longer spread out. It has reached its limit. If it spreads out any more, it's not going to be able to function, people aren't going to be able to get to work. The freeways are clogged. People are starting to concentrate on downtown again. When the city was founded, they put it in the right place. It has connections to Pasadena, San Gabriel Valley, Santa Monica, Orange County, the West Side. In the 1930s and 1940s, it was the centre of attention. But when the city spread out, downtown lost its reason to exist or to be the centre. That's changing. It won't become the centre, as in most other cities. But it's going to be a centre where you go for experiences that you cannot find in other parts of the city-the LA Philharmonic, the Staples arena, the Museum of Contemporary Art... Frank Gehry's building is going to refocus LA on downtown as the destination for culture. Disney Hall is probably the most important public building in the history of Los Angeles. This is no longer about suburban culture. It's no longer in private residences where innovation is going to happen. Architects like Gehry are starting to do buildings that have to do with public spaces and public functions."
This is a monumental weight of expectation to place on the shoulders of a single building, and there are many commentators who doubt the validity of Koshalek's civic dream, or the imperious ambitions of Eli Broad. "In LA, you either live in a void or on a margin," says Nicolai Ouroussoff. "Nobody lives in the centre of anything. That won't change." Ouroussoff, himself a transplanted New Yorker, is one of LA's millions of inhabitants who quite like it the way it is. "You have to change your ideas about what beauty is; stop looking for the same things." In this view, Gehry is more an eminent flowering of LA culture than a radical challenge to the city. "It isn't just about Hollywood," Ouroussoff adds, "there really is a culture, and Gehry has become the grizzled old cultural figure here."
Whether or not the Disney Hall, clad in its 15,000 angel-hair steel plates, will help catalyse a centrifugal process in LA is questionable. What is less questionable is its success as a work of architecture. Just down the road from it, Rafael Moneo's cathedral has recently opened. The contrast between the two buildings is instructive. The interior of Moneo's cathedral is austere and rather wonderful, but from the outside, it resembles a concrete bunker, as if it were embarrassed to be in such an undistinguished environment. By contrast, Gehry's building-with its viewing platforms, gardens and multiple openings-embraces downtown, even with its corporate skyscrapers, human-unfriendly streets, concrete detritus and hideous hotels. "The Disney Hall has responsibility to the buildings around it, even though I don't like them," says Gehry. "The Chandler has a curve, and Disney catches the curve. Democracy creates a chaotic city form, but I accept it in an optimistic way."
In the end, what is indisputable is the scale of Gehry's imaginative engagement with the buildings, places and people that are important to him-from a galleon in the vast suburban tide of Los Angeles, to a tender tribute in Scotland built for his friend, Maggie.
