LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR SUNDAY, AUGUST 25, 2019F3
ARCHITECTURE
a design that former Times archi-
tecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff
once likened to “the deck of an air-
craft carrier.”
That should change, however,
with the $41-million revamp of the
Music Center’s new plaza by Rios
Clementi Hale Studios, which
opens to the public this week.
The redesign is less a full-blown
re-do than a careful surgical inter-
vention. It is intended to make the
Music Center more flexible and
functional, a space that can accom-
modate community dance nights
as well as experimental outdoor
theater. It also aims to improve the
visual and physical links between
the raised complex and the bur-
geoning pedestrian life on Grand
Avenue and in Grand Park below —
attempting to breathe some life
into the urban spaces around the
theaters, which generally come
alive only in the hours before a
show.
“The plaza,” says Moore, “is the
physical manifestation of the
changes to how we are program-
ming.”
The guiding concept: acces-
sibility.
Joining Moore on this warm
weekday morning is the low-key
Bob Hale, the architectural part-
ner who led the redesign efforts on
behalf of his firm.
“We really saw the ability to cre-
ate access for everybody as both fa-
cilitating that access but also pro-
viding opportunities that didn’t
exist,” he says. “A lot of it is empow-
ering people to be engaged in ways
that they want to be engaged.”
Hale’s team has left the basic
geometries of the Music Center —
Becket’s columned Dorothy Chan-
dler Pavilion, the circular Mark Ta-
per Forum and the boxy Ahman-
son Theatre — untouched. But he
has reworked the broad sunken
plaza that brought them together.
(The plaza was originally designed
by the landscape architecture firm
of Cornell, Bridgers and Troller in
association with Becket.)
One issue with the 1960s-era de-
sign was the short cascades of
steps around the plaza — leading
up to the Dorothy Chandler Pavil-
ion, down from Hope Street and up
to the fountain, where Jacques Lip-
chitz’s massive bronze sculpture
“Peace on Earth,” from 1969, occu-
pied pride of place.
The stepped layout long cre-
ated problems for patrons with
mobility issues. And the advent of
the Americans with Disabilities
Act in 1990 brought with it a circu-
itous array of temporary ramps.
While these solved accessibility is-
sues, from the perspective of navi-
gation (which was circuitous), not
to mention aesthetics, it was an in-
elegant solution.
The new design raises the entire
plaza to a single level so no steps or
ramps are required to navigate its
breadth. “Creating accessibility,”
says Hale, “that was a big issue.”
Outside performances
Just as significant was the idea
of opening the plaza to multiple
uses.
Lipchitz’s bronze sculpture,
once at the center of the fountain,
has been relocated 100 feet to the
northwest, along Hope St., where it
forms an axis with the Department
of Water and Power building and
City Hall to the southeast. When
the fountain is turned off, the plaza
becomes a single expanse — the
sort of space that can be used for
music shows, dance performances,
screenings, theatrical events and
community happenings. (The Mu-
sic Center is already behind Dance
DTLA, the free outdoor dance
parties that draw hundreds of peo-
ple for music, grooving and dance
lessons.)
“Art happens everywhere; it
doesn’t just happen in a theater,”
says Moore. “The kind of stuff this
place will allow us to do speaks to
the future of where the arts is. ... We
don’t confer it on anyone. It’s a dia-
logue.”
Part of the challenge was at-
tempting to extend that dialogue
beyond the insular architecture of
the Music Center.
Like other cultural complexes
of the era — the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, which
opened in 1965, or Lincoln Center in
New York City (1962) — the Music
Center sat at a remove from the
sidewalk, creating, quite literally, a
space apart for the arts.
“It was very much an intro-
verted place,” says Hale. “ButMid-
century Modernism — that was
what they did. They saw it as hon-
oring the arts more consciously
than making it elitist, but it re-
sulted in a perception of an elitist
place.”
In the case of the Music Center,
it is a double whammy. The per-
forming arts center not only hovers
at least 10 feet above reach of the
street, the whole compound is at
the top of steep Bunker Hill.
Furthermore, most of what
passersby see when they walk past
on Grand Avenue is infrastructur-
al: a single restaurant (Kendall’s
Brasserie) sandwiched between a
loading dock and a pair of parking
garage entrances. It’s almost as if
the whole complex were saying,I
dare you to visit.
There is an explanation for this:
namely that the Grand Avenue
side of the Music Center — the
street from which the vast majority
of its patrons approach it — isn’t
the front of the complex but the
rear.
When Becket designed the
place in the early 1960s, Bunker Hill
was largely denuded after a wave of
“slum clearance” efforts wiped
away all the Victorian rooming
houses that occupied the hillside.
So the architect oriented the cul-
tural compound toward Hope
Street, where A.C. Martin’s De-
partment of Water and Power
(completed in 1965) was then
under construction across the
street.
“That was seen as the front
door,” says Hale. Unfortunately,
“the rest of the city didn’t follow
suit.”
It was Grand Avenue, not Hope
Street, that ultimately became the
principal cultural corridor on Bun-
ker Hill, attracting the Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles in
the 1980s, followed by Frank
Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall
in 2003, and the Broad museum in- The arrival of Grand Park in
2012 (also designed by Rios Clem-
enti Hale) further oriented life
away from Hope Street.
For Hale, it was therefore im-
portant to create points of connec-
tion between the Music Center and
the street — and to do it all without
gutting the place. To achieve this,
the architectural team once again
took out their scalpels and made
some careful incisions.
The principal concrete stair-
case that led from Grand Avenue
up to the plaza was rebuilt at a
shallower, more gradual angle to
make it easier to navigate and al-
low for improved sight lines from
the street up toward the complex.
On either side of the steps, they
added escalators under prominent
glass canopies. Above these, large
billboards mark the entrance to
the Music Center.
In addition, a row of gray gran-
ite slabs that bear the names of im-
portant donors — “the tomb-
stones,” Hale calls them — have
been relocated from the Grand Av-
enue side of the complex, where
they walled off the plaza from the
street, to the new Lisa Specht Wel-
come Center, on Hope Street. It is
here that visitors will be able to find
information about programming
and food options, of which there
will now be many more.Places to eat and drink
Along with a burger stand (Up-
stage Burger) and a Mexican
restaurant (Cocina Roja), both in
operation, the plaza will see the ad-
dition of a bar (the Mullin Wine
Bar), a coffee house (Go Get Em
Tiger) and a sit-down restaurant,
Abernethy’s (named for Music
Center vice chair Robert Aber-
nethy), which will give the stage to
emerging Los Angeles chefs for
three months at a time. Both the
Mullin and Go Get Em Tiger sit atthe edge of the Grand Avenue side
of the property and will be visible
from the street.
“Part of engaging the communi-
ty is seeing what’s going on up
here,” says Hale. “When you’re
down on Grand Avenue, you’ll now
be able to see people hanging out
and drinking and eating and you’ll
be able to see activity on the plaza.”
Also drawing visitors to the site
will be a pair of large LED screens
above the welcome center that can
be employed for performance
simulcasts, to display art or for
interactive experiences.
“There will be nothing commer-
cial,” says Moore. “We are working
with yU+co — a digital studio in
Hollywood — and they are working
with our programming team for in-
ventive ways of using the screens.”
This redesign has been almost
two decades in the making.
In 2001, as Disney Hall was
under construction across the
street (it too is part of the Music
Center), Gehry gathered a group of
high-profile architects and design-
ers to brainstorm “blue sky” con-
cepts for improving the urbanism
of the surrounding area.
One proposal suggested lower-
ing the Music Center’s plaza to
make it contiguous to Grand Ave-
nue. That plan never got beyond
the idea stage. (The Music Center
sits on four split-level stories of
parking garage, and to redo any of
that would have been economically
astronomical.) But it highlighted
the need to contend with the cen-
ter’s standoffish design.Hale’s hope is that his work
makes the center more accessible
while preserving something of its
character. This is, after all, the spot
where a youthful Zubin Mehta con-
ducted violinist Jascha Heifetz.
Where Edward James Olmos saun-
tered on stage as El Pachuco in the
groundbreaking “Zoot Suit.”
Where Mikhail Baryshnikov
danced “The Nutcracker” just a
few years after defecting. Where a
10-year-old Tatum O’Neal toted
around a supporting actress Oscar
she won for her role in “Paper
Moon” (back when the Academy
Awards ceremony was held at the
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion).
“In a city like Los Angeles, our
heritage isn’t so long,” he says.
“But this is a place with heritage, so
figuring out how to preserve that in
a way that isn’t a white elephant,
but is in fact renewed, seems like a
better model.”
In the meantime, Moore and
the rest of the team at the Music
Center are looking at the ways they
might begin to program the re-
designed plaza. The first weekend
is packed: with a cumbia dance jam
on Aug. 30, a Master Chorale
sing-a-long on Aug. 31 and a family-
friendly splash party on Sept. 1.
Howard Sherman, the Music
Center’s COO, says, “We want to
not tinker for six months and let
the plaza tell us what it needs.”
But Moore has ideas. “Maybe an
awards show,” she says with a
laugh.
Note to Hollywood: The plaza is
open.An aloof plaza reaches out
RIOS CLEMENTI HALE’S redesign of the plaza in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion raises the entire area to a single level.A REFRESHED STAIRCASE flanked by new escalators is part of a redesign to make the Music Center plaza more accessible.Photographs byTim Street-Porter[Center,from F1]