Fabulous At Fifty

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-music-center/20141116-column.html#pages=1

The Los Angeles Music Center
Welton Becket
dornsife.usc.edu

Hello Everyone:

Turning fifty can be a cause for celebration or shock.  As children, the idea of reaching the half century mark meant that you were old.  In Los Angeles, admitting that you are fifty is strictly verboten.  A building or place celebrating its fiftieth birthday is definitely cause for celebration.  Fifty is the magic number for preservation-minded people to pause and begin serious consideration of a place or building's significance.  The Los Angeles Music Center in Downtown Los Angeles is celebrating its fiftieth birthday.  Our favorite architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, pauses to consider the role of this performing complex in his Los Angeles Times article, "At 50, Music Center's 'backward' orientation may see a turnaround," as Downtown Los Angeles reorients itself as more pedestrian friendly place.

The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
flickriver.com

The Los Angeles Music Center was designed by Welton Becket, dedicated on September 27, 1964 and officially opened on December 6, 1964.  The Music Center was the result of a public/private non-profit partnership with the County Board of Supervisors.  The performing arts complex was spearheaded by Dorothy Buffum Chandler, who was appointed to chair a citizen's committee in April 1955 to build a permanent home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  Under Mrs. Chandler's guidance, the scope of the project was expanded to include a performing arts center, raising $18.7 million in private donations at a cost of $152,000.  The County contributed the Bunker Hill site and raised the remain $14 million through mortgage revenue bonds.  Construction began on March 12, 1962 and was completed in April 1967.  The original complex was composed of three venues: the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Mark Taper Forum, and the Ahmanson Theatre.  On October 23, 2003, the Music Center opened the Walt Disney Concert Hall, expanding the site to 11-acres.  The Disney Concert Hall is home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Master Chorale.  It includes the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), the William M. Keck Foundation Children's Amphitheater, and the Nadine and Ed Carson Amphitheater. (http://www.musiccenter.org)

Walt Disney Concert Hall
latimes.com

For most of its history, the relationship between the Music Center's late modern architecture and the automobile worked fine or, at least, good enough not to attract attention.  Now, as the rest of the downtown area is experiencing a renaissance, rapidly becoming a residential community with parks and cafes, the Music Center's stand-offish character is harder to ignore. Specifically, Downtown Los Angeles is becoming more pedestrian friendly, which makes the climb up the steep streets, toward the Music Center, seem more daunting.  It seems, according to Mr. Hawthorne, "...we've been using the place all wrong."  Why has this been the case.  It seems that what Angelenos consider the front of the Music Center, along Grand Avenue, Welton Becket envisioned the Grand Avenue side entrance as a secondary entrance.  The late architect actually intended was "...the public gateway to its plaza, along Hope Street, we think of as the back-of-house: as the spot for valet drop-offs and little more.

The Mark Taper Forum
tripomatic.com

The topography of the site tell the real tale.  The late architect designed the plaza to be flush with the sidewalk along Hope, facing the A.C. Martin late modern masterpiece Department of Water and Power Building (1965).  Yet, along Grand Avenue, patrons are ten feet below plaza level and must negotiate either a challenging set of steps or a series of ominously dark entrances to the loading docks and garage.  Not exactly the hoped for glamourous entrance that the architect had in mind.  The architecture leaves hints indicating that visitors are accessing the complex from the back.  However, the visitors still insist on treating the Grand Avenue side as the main entrance.  Yours truly will admit to committing this same error.  However, in my defense, I did not know better.

REDCAT Theater
stageandcinema.com

Christopher Hawthorne writes,

This is, in fact, a familiar for any city trying to reintegrate its urban-renewal landmarks into the larger civic fabric.  Many of those buildings were designed in a relative vacuum, free from the responsibilities to context and scale that architects typically take on when working in the center of a big city.

This context-free design becomes more problematic when the open spaces surrounding these urban-renewal landmarks begin to be filled in.  The Music Center's three auditoria: The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (1964), the Mark Taper Forum (1967)m and the Ahmanson Theatre (1967) are products of this era and its approach to urban design.  The site assigned to the architect by Dorothy Chandler, wife of Los Angeles Times Publisher Norman Chandler, was wide open, cleared by the redevelopment agency "...in a burst of postwar optimism or urban renewal aggression, depending on your point of view."  Mr. Hawthorne describes the site, "...even by the standards of the period this was a dramatically empty site: A tabula rasa inside the larger tabula rasa of newly shorn Bunker Hill."

The Ahmanson Theater
southlandarchitecture.com

Thus, from the beginning, the Music Center would accomplish more than simply set itself apart from the surrounding streets and sidewalks, similar to Lincoln Center in New York, completed in 1962 and the William Pereira designed Los Angeles County Art Museum in the Miracle Mile.  Welton Becket understood, as the Music Center was being built, that the DWP would be its neighbor but otherwise, this shining cultural landmark would stand along on the hill.

The late architect described his design as "a contemporary expression of classic architecture," similar to LACMA and Lincoln Center with subtle ornament added to the spare modern surfaces.  However, in the urban context, the concept was quite different.  The feeling of grandeur that LACMA and Lincoln Center embodied by being setback from the busy street is missing at the Music Center.  Mr. Hawthorne elucidates, "This helps explain why the Music Center wound up getting turned backward-or, to be more precise, why our understanding of how to use did."  Further, "Over time, as buildings began to fill in that empty space around the Music Center, Hope Street lost favor in the Bunker Hill pecking order.  And Grand Avenue gained it.

101 Powell Security Plaza (left)
102 Powell Security Plaza (right)
en.wikipedia.org

 The early eighties brought the twin California Plaza      skyscrapers and the Arata Isozaki designed Museum of    Contemporary Art.  Later the Coburn School of Music  debuted, on the opposite end of Grand Avenue, the  Rafael Moneo designed Cathedral of Our Lady of the  Angeles and Coop Himmelblau's high school for the arts  came along.  In 2003 Frank Gehry's Walt  Disney Concert Hall premiered and was officially added  to the Music Center complex, thus flipping the intended urbanism of the Becket-designed complex upside down and landing directly onto Grand.  Mr. Hawthorne observes, "It's not surprising that a major challenge for the architects enlisted over the years by the Music Center to reimagine the plaza-most recently, the L.A. firm Rios Clementi Hale Studios-has been how to make the Grand Avenue frontage less of an afterthought."

Now the stakes are growing.  The DTLA renaissance that has resuscitated much of the area has yet to reach Bunker Hill, leading Mr. Hawthorne to muse, "And maybe it never will, given the sheet difficulty of creating a cultural corridor in a a location so topographically and culturally separate from the rest of the city."  Grand and Hope Streets are still quieter than Broadway, Spring Street, or Santa Fe Avenue.  What is the pay off once you reach the top of the hill?  A stunning view of the wide entrances to the Music Center garage.

Dance party at the Music Center Plaza
musiccenter.org

Urban design is like fashion, "everything is new again."  The pedestrian path along Hope Street leading to the Music Center's front door, as originally imagined by Welton Becket, is about to get more traffic.  The imminent increase in traffic will come courtesy of a new subway station, part of a $927-million Regional Connector project, scheduled open on 2nd and Hope in 2020.  Mr. Hawthorne adds, "So far the assumption by transit planners-and philanthropist Eli Broad, who is building a museum just east of the that station-is that most of passengers will leave the station and walk immediately toward Grand Avenue, passing through a new tree-filled plaza next to the museum on their way."  This sounds like a a nice idea but as Mr. Hawthorne cautions, "But anybody going straight from the subway to the Music Center will soon discover that taking Hope, along what still feels like the back side of the complex is the more direct route.  Once they do, they'll be entering the Music Center just as Welton Becket intended 50 years ago."

Happy Birthday Music Center and many more. Let us toast to a bright future of bringing grand cultural events to Los Angeles.  Fifty is going to be fabulous.