Frank Gehry: making downtown L.A. sing—Frank Gehry does his magic and Dennis Hopper photographs it

Los Angeles may be the quintessential city of celluloid dreams, stars and megabucks, but its architectural profile, at least to the general population, remains rooted in secluded Hollywood Hills bungalows and donut stands created, well, in the shape of donuts. True, the city has a long tradition of innovative domestic architecture in the modernist vein (some of which have made memorable appearances in the movies) by masters like Frank Lloyd Wright, R.M. Schindler, Richard Neutra and John Lautner. But aside from the Richard Meier-designed building for the Getty Museum, there hasn't been the amount of grand, innovative architecture in the public eye one would expect from a place that's all about building dreams. Happily that may be changing, as the city recently announced that such heavyweights of architecture as Steven Holl and Rem Koolhaas had been brought in to design new facilities for the Natural History Museum and L.A. County Museum of Art respectively. Together with the Frank O. Gehry-designed Walt Disne y Concert Hall, currently under construction in the historic Bunker Hill area of downtown L.A., these recent projects are attempting yet another transformation of our conception of L.A.

Aside from Philip Johnson-the spry 96-year-old icon of 20th-century American architecture-Gehry is almost certainly ours most famous living architect, and he has never been more in demand than he is today. The spectacular visual vocabulary he employed for the Guggenheim Museum's branch in Bilbao, Spain--not to mention its overwhelming scale--marked something of a watershed in his career. As the Concert Hall nears its fail 2003 completion date, the obvious question relates to the perception that this structure must represent some sort of continuity or departure with respect to the Bilbao model. Not exactly, according to the architect: "The Concert Hall was actually designed before [Bilbao] ... we started 15 years ago." Gehry maintains that the most significant change in the building's design concerns materials: The only alteration that came after Bilbao was changing [the Concert Hall] to metal. It was originally stone." The titanium sheathing of the Bilbao museum is one' of its most remarkable features; no won der, then that subsequent to its completion the design of the Concert Hall would be altered to include the more glamorous treatment of stainless steel.

The other striking aspect of the Concert Hall is its location--downtown Los Angeles, an area where corporate skyscrapers rise amid the desuetude and apparent chaos of warehouses, artist studios, Mexican markets and skid row. But the neighborhood does boast two of the city's premier cultural centers, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (sometime home of the annual Oscar ceremony) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, another of L.A.'s architectural masterpieces, designed by Arata Isozaki. With the addition of Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, the area begins to achieve a certain critical mass culturally in a city typically (albeit erroneously) regarded as void of any significant culture outside the entertainment industry.

Gehry's attitude toward the architectural context of the Concert Hall--and perhaps to the skepticism voiced in some quarters on the viability of a large-scale revitalization of downtown L.A. as a whole--comes off as charmingly gruff and blunt. Questioned as to the Concert Hall's relation to the surrounding area, he retorted: "That's a good question, because there is no context." On the other hand, he emphasizes his concern that the Concert Hall would relate harmoniously to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion rather than overwhelm it: "I spent a lot of time worrying about its relationship to the Chandler. I was concerned that no matter what I did, because [the Concert Hall] was modern and new, it would upstage the Chandler. And I wanted to minimize that. Since the Chandler is one big large form, I broke down the size of the Concert Hall into a bunch of smaller forms."

The actor, director and photographer Dennis Hopper, who photographed the images presented here, has known Gehry for many years, and in a variety of contexts-"I live in two houses of his," he remarks. He recently took these pictures of Gehry's Concert Hall while it was under construction, and he has a sharp take on what makes Gehry such an extraordinary figure in his field: "He's lived in an artistic world, his friends are artists, he has collaborated with artists, he has kept himself open to things that are new and he is progressive with a very guerilla aesthetic. I think Bilbao is the greatest building of the 20th century. And, in my opinion, the Concert Hall will be our greatest architectural achievement here in Los Angeles." As for the prospect of renewed Vitality for L.A.'s downtown offered by Gehry's latest tour de force, Hopper is his characteristically dry self. 'It's the oil business and the Mexican black market," he says mordantly of the neighborhood. So there's nowhere to go but up.