L.A.’s Music Center was built as an aloof city on a hill. Can a remade plaza change that?
LA TimesIn 1964, when the first phase of the Music Center — the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion — opened in downtown Los Angeles, designer and painter Millard Sheets wrote a tribute to architect Welton Becket’s Modernist temple to the arts in the pages of The Times: “They have created a form that will stand high on the hill and high in spirit that will not be quickly dated or lacking in technical qualities needed for its function.” Time has a funny way of rendering statements about timelessness obsolete. That is a very outward vision.” It’s a vision that has been ill-served by the Music Center’s aloof midcentury architecture, which has long stood, seemingly out of reach, a full story above Grand Avenue and the rest of the city, in a design that former Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff once likened to “the deck of an aircraft 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 next week. “A lot of it is empowering people to be engaged in ways that they want to be engaged.” Architect Bob Hale, of Rios Clementi Hale Studios, stands before the redesigned Music Center plaza. “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.” Bob Hale of Rios Clementi Hale Studios, whose firm did the design work for a revamp of L.A.’s Music Center plaza.
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