LOS ANGELES — When this city's Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in 2003, it was 10 years late and $164 million over its original budget.
Yet 21 months into its life, Disney Hall is considered a triumph of architecture, a marvel of acoustics. Crowds are flocking to it, and developers are throwing up shops and high-rises around it. It's creating a center for a sprawling urban area that has never had one.
"It finally gives the city a heart," said Stephen D. Rountree, president of the Los Angeles Music Center, which includes Disney Hall and three venues built in the 1960s.
In Miami, the Performing Arts Center, 80 percent complete and scheduled to open in fall 2006, is 20 months late and $67.7 million over budget — drawing heavy criticism.
Disney Hall's short history gives a glimpse of what Miami's center could become — and provides lessons for PAC leaders about attracting restaurants and other businesses and providing ample and convenient parking.
Parking, for one, is at least a short-term challenge for the PAC. It will open without its own garage, relying on nearby temporary surface lots and privately owned garages.
Important, too, are intangibles, said L.A. Music Center Programming Director Josephine Ramirez. "It's essential to connect with the public. To avoid an elitist image. To get people to see your center as a public space, a reason to come downtown."
Disney Hall, the most recently opened major U.S. performance venue, has several parallels to Miami's PAC. It created high expectations in being designed by a world-famous architect. It had to deal with building delays, soaring budgets, skeptical donors. And its goal was to give a sprawling city a downtown center.
Architecture praised
Disney Hall's architecture is jarring — utterly unlike the gray and tan mid-rise buildings around it. Designed by Frank Gehry, it is a jutting tangle of shapes that he calls billowing sails.
Critics love it. In his opening-night review, New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp was reduced to towering babble: "Imagine a moon apple, a hollow sphere of lunar light. A flowering cabbage. Pumpkin into carriage, cabbage into concert hall, bibbidy bobbidy boo."
Designing Miami's Carnival Concert Hall, Ziff Ballet Opera House and Studio Theater, Performing Arts Center architect Cesar Pelli has promised "two splendid, incredible structures that will be the pride of Miami."
Lively acoustics
To appreciate the sound in Disney Hall, even an amateur music fan needs only to sit 25 rows back and listen to the Los Angeles Philharmonic: the aching vibrato of a violin; the blast of a trombone; the saturated warmth of the full orchestra.
The acoustics are so lively that the orchestra had to tone down its playing, said assistant conductor Alexander Mickelthwaite. "It's like getting a Ferrari after driving a Volkswagen. You press on the gas and it races away; you have to learn to be more sensitive."
Disney Hall was designed with a fixed acoustical system — meaning the hall was adjusted once for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and is not changed for other groups. Its opening was delayed for four months to fine-tune the acoustics — using the full Philharmonic for the testing and filling seats with school groups, volunteers and workers because bodies in seats are part of any hall's acoustics.
So while the hall is perfect for the Philharmonic, it was thrown off balance when k.d. lang performed, with amplified voice and electric guitars.
"Disney is not a great hall for amplified music," Rountree said, and many such groups today are using other venues around Los Angeles.
Miami's PAC will have adjustable acoustics, because the symphony hall might host an orchestra one night, a jazz ensemble the next, a rock band the next.
The Miami system is designed to adjust the hall's acoustics via huge doors that open into empty chambers to change the room's volume. A similar system at Philadelphia's Kimmel Center — designed by the firm that did the Miami acoustics — was called "an acoustical Sahara" by some critics when it opened in 2001. A year of adjustments brought better, although not entirely favorable, reviews.
Miami PAC Trust President Michael Hardy said Miami should fare better.
'In Philadelphia, the acoustical doors were 'value-engineered' down to be much lighter, both for cost and for time," Hardy said. "Acousticians feel they didn't have the maximum effect. Our doors will be much thicker. And the doors have worked very well in halls in Lucerne, Switzerland, and Birmingham, England."
PAC officials say there has been no "value engineering" of Miami's acoustics.
Heart of community
Disney Hall's greatest achievement, some supporters say, has less to do with music than with creating a heart for downtown Los Angeles.
'Since the Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in October 2003, it has become the shining symbol of downtown Los Angeles' revitalization," said Mark Liberman, president and chief executive officer of LA INC., the Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Disney Hall has brought new life to the four-block-long Los Angeles Music Center, which also includes the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, opened in 1964, and the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre, opened in 1967.
The six restaurants inside the center and its outdoor plaza have created new pedestrian traffic. Grand Avenue, which runs alongside, has been realigned and landscaped with flowering trees.
Now a bigger transformation is coming, with Los Angeles city and county approval of a $1.8 billion plan by private developers to line Grand Avenue with high-rise apartments and office towers, a boutique hotel, retail shops, a multi-screen cinema, restaurants, a bookstore and a supermarket.
"We have to create a nightlife," Rountree said. "We need dining at different price levels, more shops of all kinds, a street scene where there's a Barnes & Noble open at midnight, an area to bring in the young, the hip."
In Miami, a construction boom is transforming Biscayne Boulevard north and south of the PAC as planners scramble to guide the growth. "Things are coming faster than we can handle them," said Frank Rollason of the Miami Community Redevelopment Agency.
Within a year, Miami should have a master plan, he said. "It will encourage mixed residential use, restaurants, shops, integrated parking, bookstores, nightclubs — all the things you need to make it an urban living area."
Planners hope it isn't too late. Rollason said some of the condos built farther north on Biscayne lack some of the pedestrian-friendly aspects — street-level shops, for example — that he would like to see around the center.
Parking differences
At the Los Angeles Music Center, two parking garages extending seven floors into the ground provide 3,800 spaces for the center's 8,100 seats — all accessible by elevators. It's a ratio of one parking space for each 2.1 seats. The garages spin off $2.5 million a year for the center.
At the Miami Performing Arts Center, attempts over several years to build parking garages in conjunction with the Miami-Dade School Board or private developers have stalled, and the Miami PAC will have no parking garage of its own when it opens.
Hardy said the PAC is negotiating for temporary use of parking spaces in the Omni parking garage, The Miami Herald's parking garage, a School Board parking garage and several surface lots, aiming to provide 1,500 temporary spaces within a block or so of the 4,800-seat center by opening day. It's a ratio of one parking space for every 3.2 seats — with all spaces requiring a walk outdoors.
Miami has a 49-page report by Abramson & Associates, parking consultants, which proposes at least two parking garages some time after the PAC opens, Hardy said.
Places to dine
In Los Angeles, star chef Joachim Splichal moved his flagship Patina restaurant from funky Melrose Avenue into Disney Hall. Today, Splichal's Patina Group has six restaurants in the complex, contributing $1.5 million a year to the center.
In Miami, the PAC will have one restaurant open to the public at all performances: a 75-seat "sandwiches and wraps" cafe in the Art Deco Tower. Inside the Ballet Opera House will be the 150-seat Carlin Banquet Hall, reserved for planned events; when it's not booked, it will be open to PAC members on a first-come, first-served basis, with unused tables open to the public. Hardy predicts that the two facilities will generate $500,000 a year.
Fair comparison?
The Miami-Los Angeles comparison is not completely parallel. Los Angeles built the first three halls of its music center in the 1960s. Los Angeles County has 10 million residents; the combined population of Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties is 4.5 million. And Broward and Palm Beach have their own performing arts centers.
But that only underscores the difficulties facing Miami.
Despite the challenges, Al Milano, chief fundraiser for the Miami PAC, is optimistic. He said he's negotiating with a major corporation for $20 million for naming rights to the PAC.
Does that mean we soon might be taking in a concert, ballet or opera at, say, the "Union Planters" or "Maroone" performing arts center?
"Something like that."
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