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In the Los Angeles Magazine profile mentioned a couple of posts below, Frank Gehry suggests that his Disney Hall -- as well as MOCA and the Cathedral of the Angels -- would do more for L.A. if they were located on Wilshire Boulevard and not downtown. The New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who is swept away by Disney Hall, doesn't speak to that, but writes this week that downtown now has its most impressive landmark.
Downtown Los Angeles has only a handful of singular pieces of architecture—Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s Central Library of 1926, Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art of 1986, and Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, finished last year—and Disney Hall is now surely the most distinguished building in the area...It may be that restaurants, stores, and housing will rise up around Disney Hall and transform the neighborhood into the urban mecca that so many people seek, but I wouldn’t bet on it, and it doesn’t matter. Disney Hall is something rarer than a great urban street. It is a serene, ennobling building that will give people in this city of private places a new sense of the pleasures of public space.
Goldberger calls the new concert hall on Grand Avenue the most important Gehry building in the U.S. His bottom line: It "lifts the the spirits of those who see it from the sidewalk or, this being Los Angeles, from the windows of their cars, and the inside is equally inspiring."