On October 23rd, the Walt Disney concert hall, the project that almost never was, will celebrate its ten-year anniversary. Throughout these ten years it has had all manner of transformative power attributed to it. But has it really transformed LA? What would the city have been like if it had never been built? Would it be fundamentally different?
The answer? No.The city wouldn’t even be that different in the immediate vicinity of Grand Avenue.
LA does in fact have a downtown, and in the past ten years it has seen somewhat of a building renaissance and an uptick in gleeful boosterism. But this can’t be attributed to Frank Gehry’s building, no matter how glaringly brilliant it is. After all, the real catalyst for change there was Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art. That’s what got people coming. Even so, for being in the middle of downtown, it’s a relatively sleepy area - like a suburban bedroom community, but with taller buildings.
