Angelenos have a good reason to walk along Grand Avenue—to hang out at Disney Hall’s new sidewalk café or merely to gawk at the hall’s sinuous, stainless-steel wrapper. At the corner of Grand and First, the enclosing forms curve open to the main entrance, across from the Philharmonic’s old home at the Music Center.

PROJECT DIARY The story of how Frank Gehry’s design and Lillian Disney’s dream were ultimately rescued to create the masterful WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL

By James S. Russell, AIA

P H OTO G R A P H Y : © L A R A S W I M M E R / E S TO

Fleischmann and a committee assembled to manage the construction visited many of the world’s great halls. Two that particularly impressed the group were not on the usual greatest-hits lists. One was the Berlin Philharmonie, a dramatically expressionistic composition of terraced and overlapping tiers completed in 1963 to a design by Hans Scharoun with acoustician Lothar Cremer. The other acoustical standout was Suntory Hall, 1986, in Tokyo (Yasui Architects), where the acoustical consultant had been Nagata Acoustics, a firm well known only in Japan. In the meantime, an architectural subcommittee winnowed a list of 80 architects down to four who would compete for the commission: Gottfried Böhm, of Cologne, Germany; Hans Hollein, Vienna;
Project: Walt Disney Concert Hall,

Los Angeles Client: Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, the Music Center of Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Architect: Gehry Partners—Frank Gehry, FAIA, partner; James M. Glymph, partner; Craig Webb, project

designer; Terry Bell, project manager Consultants: Nagata Acoustics, L’Observatoire (lighting); John A. Martin & Associates (structural); Theatre Projects Consultants; Rolf Jensen & Associates (fire protection, accessibility); Manuel Rosales (organ) Contractor: M.A. Mortenson
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PRO JECTS

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ay 1987. Ernest Fleischmann, the executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, took an urgent telephone call while waiting for a flight in New York. The call was about a gift, one of the most extraordinary ever offered any cultural institution, let alone an orchestra. Lillian Disney, the widow of Walt, had offered $50 million to build a new home for the Philharmonic. It seemed unbelievably auspicious. While the gift would not cover the entire cost, it would drastically reduce the fund-raising burden. No one knew at the time that building Walt Disney Hall would ultimately consume the next 16 years and cost more than five times the sum Mrs. Disney had offered. Since 1964, the Philharmonic had performed in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, one of three performing-arts halls in the Los Angeles Music Center complex. Architect Welton Beckett had mounted the center on a chilly raised plaza and surrounded it by an arcade, an uneasy marriage of Modernist style and Classicist form that was typical of an arts acropolis of its time. The barnlike Chandler—long famous as home of the Academy Awards—swallowed the orchestra’s sound. A parcel had been reserved across the street for future expansion, and it was for this site that Mrs. Disney offered her gift, with approval of the county, which owned it. She also specified a deadline of December 31, 1992, for ground breaking.

1987–1988: Chain-link architect for a champagne client

James Stirling Michael Wilford, London; and Frank O. Gehry, FAIA. The Europeans all had more impressive resumes: They all had won the Pritzker Prize; Gehry had not. They all had built acclaimed major projects (museums in the case of Stirling Wilford and Hollein), but none of the competitors had designed a major concert space. Gehry, however, had long worked with the Philharmonic to enhance the Hollywood Bowl and had built two outdoor concert pavilions.
1988–1991: A hometown trophy and a Pritzker

right). Near-final model with limestone cladding, 1992 (bottom).

Competition-winning model, 1988, with bridge to Chandler Pavilion.

The Los Angeles design, however, had to be reconciled with the county’s desire to add revenue-generating components to the site. A parking garage was to be built under the hall. Later, the team tried to accommodate a 350-room hotel, but it fell through. A chamber-music hall was originally part of the project, but was jettisoned. Each change involved a thorough redesign. Though the Philharmonic’s music director, André Previn, resigned in 1989, it was a good year for Gehry. He won his Pritzker, and his design sensibility had evolved. He had by then begun wrapping overlapping sinuous curves around the blocky, sometimes self-consciously clunky forms he had become known for. The first realized work in this new direction, the Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein, Switzerland, established Gehry as a figure of international significance. As his work took on increasing geometric complexity, partner Jim Glymph pioneered the use of CATIA, the three-dimensional modeling software that would help assure that Gehry’s enriched formal vocabulary could be built to budget. Designing Disney with sketchy paper models, Gehry fixed four soaring wedge shapes to the outwardly canted rectangular box containing the auditorium, clustering around the hall chunky smaller shapes for lobbies and ancillary functions. As design proceeded, the shapes softened to fluttering shells or curved, conelike forms clad in limestone. These gestures were Gehry’s way of acknowledging Lillian Disney’s love of flowers and gardens. “She didn’t understand the outside,” Gehry confesses. “She would send people with books of ducky ponds and thatched roofs and say, ‘Could you consider … .’ She loved the interior, though.”

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M O D E L S : C O U R T E SY G E H R Y PA R T N E R S ( T H I S PA G E ) ; P H OTO G R A P H Y : © L A R A S W I M M E R / E S TO ( O P P O S I T E , TO P ) ; R O L A N D H A L B E ( O P P O S I T E , B OT TO M )

The prospect of Gehry rankled many close to the project. He was a “wild man” who would give the orchestra plywood instead of stone and chain link instead of polished brass. Nevertheless, the committee announced the choice of Gehry’s scheme, contending that it “belongs especially to Los Angeles and will be perceived internationally as a mark of our cultural maturity.” Set behind a domed greenhouse that Gehry dubbed “a living room for the city,” the hall would seat 2,265 (1,000 fewer than Chandler) and was optimistically slated to open May 1992. A working budget of $115 million was established, but in fact no one at the beginning of 1989 knew what the real scope of the project would be—the competitors had all worked from sketchy, provisional criteria. This would await a detailed design process with an acoustician on board. But the directive from Mrs. Disney had been clear: It should strive to match the best halls in the world. Typical of large, public projects, Dworsky Associates agreed to take Gehry’s schematic design through working drawings as executive architect. The Philharmonic, with Gehry’s enthusiastic approval, hired Nagata Acoustics, the consultant that had produced Suntory Hall. Minoru Nagata subscribed to the largely unscientific yet common-sense notion of “psycho-acoustics”—if people feel comfortable and like the visual qualities of an auditorium, they’ll like the sound better. Yasuhisa Toyota, who completed Disney after Nagata retired, likes to work closely with architects who have strong ideas as long as they listen. “We think about how to support the architect so that he can freely design,” he explains. And Gehry, a self-described musical dilettante, listened. With Nagata, he essentially started from scratch on the hall, producing 82 models at 1⁄16-inch scale based on configurations for great halls in the world, from Vienna to Amsterdam to Boston. To strike a balance between an immersing visual experience and excellent sound, Gehry and Nagata discarded wellregarded historic types, evolving a unique hall form, one that drew on the exciting, audience-involving asymmetric arrangement of Berlin—which surrounded the stage with listeners in so-called “vineyard” tiers—and the symmetrical, but similarly tiered, layout of Suntory.

Early design study, 1991 (top), with proposed hotel (Chandler Pavilion to the

The main lobby level is one level above the Grand Street entrance (above). At the First and Hope Street corner, a stair ascends to a public garden (below). The shiny forms enclose a VIP Founders Rooom.

High, frondlike forms surround the hall (evoked even in an early sketch), while lower curved shapes wrap lobby spaces along Grand Avenue. Stairs at left lead to a public garden, its fairytale plantings (by Melinda Taylor) apparently inspired by Fantasia.

The building is a landscape of gardens, terraces, and a delftware fountain (to honor Lillian Disney, who collected delft).

1991–1994: Riots and a risky strategy

The final design was announced and the project was put on a fast track to meet Disney’s deadline for the late 1992 ground breaking. It was a risky strategy because fast-tracking usually sacrifices cost for speed. Dworsky struggled to translate into pricing documents the three-dimensional complexities that came out of the Gehry/Nagata collaboration. At the same time, a recession, which had hit California particularly hard, deepened. The fully televised Rodney King riot in South Central Los Angeles shocked the nation and wracked the city, inspiring broad soul-searching. A new home for the Philharmonic no longer felt like a top priority. The Philharmonic had high hopes for its new music director, a young Finnish composer and conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Though government officials feared that fund-raising had lagged the hall’s true cost, they agreed to begin construction on the garage in order to meet the Disney deadline. On paper, the funds in hand looked ample to cover the cost, still officially pegged at $110 million, but the estimate was based on early design documents. One overlooked danger signal was that the garage alone would come in at $81.5 million. Salonen, Gehry, and Toyota continued to refine the design. “Frank focused on what you might call the semiotic response, what message the design sends,” observed Salonen in an interview. Explains Gehry, “I thought a symmetrical solution would be more comforting to the orchestra. I wanted to offer a psychological handrail for people.” For similar reasons, the hall was extensively clad in wood even though plaster would have offered the same acoustical benefit at lower cost. Adds Salonen, “We were completely in agreement with the openness of the design and the nonexclusive feeling of the seats.”
Design progress variation considered in limestone, 1992 (top).

1994–1996: A mothballed masterpiece

Final design model after switch to metal, 1998 (bottom).

The Northridge earthquake wrought billions in damage throughout the region in January 1994. Contractors were inundated with urgent reconstruction projects, making it an inauspicious time to put the drawings for such an architecturally ambitious project out for pricing. The outcome stunned everyone involved: The project had unexpectedly risen to $160 million. “If you want to give a price on these drawings, you have to study them very carefully,” Daniel Dworsky told the Los Angeles Times. “This is a one-of-a-kind building. You don’t simply open up the plans and understand them quickly.” Gehry was cast by critics and the press in the role of spoiled, impractical artist. He struck back, publicly blaming Dworsky. “The executive architect was incapable of doing drawings that had this complexity,” he said in a recent interview. “We helped select that firm. I went to Daniel, supposedly a friend, and I said, ‘This is going to fail and we now have the capability to do it, so let us ghost-write it.’ ” Dworsky refused. Gehry also blames a construction manager, whose job it was to monitor cost and construction issues, for failing to keep officials abreast of rising costs. But officials involved in the project now say there were also leadership problems at the Philharmonic and the Music Center, and so cost warnings went unaddressed. Fleischmann expresses surprise at the $110 million figure now, saying he always expected the project to cost much more. (The I.M. Pei–designed Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas had come in at $108 million five years earlier, for example.) Facing $50 million more in fund-raising as costs continued to creep upward, Disney officials ordered a detailed review. The extensive damage caused by the quake would spur yet more redesign as the hall’s steel structure was changed to a braced frame, further increasing costs since 80 percent of the steel had already been purchased. Late in 1994, when the fund-raising gap looked insurmountable, the project was stopped. The county threatened to declare the project in default. The garage would remain as a partly complete, framed-concrete rebuke to all

those who had supported Gehry’s hubris. Was Gehry’s design too complex to cost? “I’d admit it if it was,” Gehry replied in an interview. “The stone exterior we designed, detailed, and estimated came in on budget.” But a larger issue was at stake, he argued. “What every architect must understand is when you have an executive architect and a construction industry that sees that what you are doing is different and can’t understand it, you cannot stand idly by. You are fending off a lot of preconceptions. You must be parental, take charge, and explain. The client always wants to build something great and underestimates the budget. The business person always blames the architect.” With the recession and the late 1980s banking crisis, downtown Los Angeles lost its bank headquarters and several corporations—the mainstay of corporate giving to major cultural projects. Los Angeles is too spread out, too centerless to support such a traditional “downtown” project, critics said. Hollywood, a traditional source of charitable donations, stayed away. (The name “Disney” on the hall did not enhance enthusiasm among executives at competing studios, either.) The Music Center and the Philharmonic rebuilt their own leadership and brought in real estate management experts from Hines interests, but the project seemed utterly to have lost momentum. Gehry, who had been conspicuously overlooked for such important local projects as the Getty Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, described himself as a pariah in his hometown even as projects like the Frederick R. Wiesman Museum, in Minneapolis, and the “Fred and Ginger” bank complex in Prague opened to acclaim. By the end of 1995, costs (including those entailed in stopping the project) were pegged at $265 million. Barely averting reversion of the site to the county and the gift to the Disney family, the county granted the Music Center an extension on its lease as it pondered how to raise $100 million—fast.
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1. Entry plaza 2. Lobby 3. Auditorium 4. Outdoor

Within the acoustical box of the hall (tinted blue by light from concealed skylights), the wood enclosures direct sound to the audience. The ceiling is the largest acoustical

surface, however. Even Gehry’s organ-pipe configuration (below) was acoustically vetted. A massive rear window (opposite) gives special character to daytime concerts.

amphitheater 5. Rehearsal 6. REDCAT 7. Offices

P H OTO G R A P H Y : © R I C H A R D B A R N E S

1996: A rave leads to a revival

In March, the parking structure opened, but Disney Hall remained moribund. A turning point of sorts arrived, according to Fleischmann, with a series of Philharmonic concerts in Paris. Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote, “It is notable that the voice [the Philharmonic] did finally find was a voice the hometown crowd at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion never hears. In the live, intimate acoustic of the Châtelet, the Philharmonic sound has an arresting immediacy.” Board members who attended were “blown away,” said Swed in an interview. “The sound’s clarity and impact gave them a sense of what would be possible in a new hall.” Director Richard Koshalek, a competition juror years earlier, put the weight of the Museum of Contemporary Art behind the Disney project by organizing a free exhibition celebrating the design. With models, computer renderings, and even a full-scale mock-up of one of the curved, limestone-clad walls, MOCA drew a broad public into the intricacies of the acoustical and architectural collaboration. Even the fiercely competitive architectural community began to rally behind the project. Orchestrated by Thom Mayne, a long list of architects worldwide paid for and signed a full-page advertisement in the Times: “Build It and They Will Come” read the headline. The rate of new gifts accelerated.
1997: An impasse?

Eli Broad, a major local philanthropist who headed SunAmerica, a homebuilder, urged the Music Center and the Philharmonic to move the project forward with a design-build team that would include a new executive architect and confine Gehry’s role to that of consultant. “When Broad brought me that scenario, I said I couldn’t live with it,” said Gehry. Then came The Letter, a now-famous missive addressed to Broad but shared with arts leaders and project funders, in which Gehry offered to withdraw. “The past few years have been difficult for me as I have taken a lot of heat for what has happened,” Gehry wrote. He argued that the Dworsky drawings remained inadequate and that a fourth of the detailing

How acoustical science augmented art in the Disney Concert Hall design
Gehry and Minoru Nagata derived a hall configuration that balanced the visual experience and sound quality by comparing study models (opposite, top) of famous halls. The room shape is so important because only a small percentage of what most people hear comes directly from the stage. In the narrow “shoe box” of some great halls, straight side walls reinforce direct sound with allimportant “early reflections,” which deliver a volume and presence that people expect in a live, unamplified performance. Disney is wider, with sides swelling outward, giving many patrons the orchestral equivalent of 50-yard-line views. Yasuhisa Toyota has calibrated the relative sound absorption of the surfaces to achieve his trademark, a combination of clarity and warmth (many halls provide one at the expense of the other). Other tweaks create an aural spaciousness and definition that allows the listener to discern the sound of a specific instrument within an ensemble and be able to locate its source. Toyota added two new dividing partitions in the orchestra after he heard the Kitara Hall (a design he derived from Disney’s). After initial testing of Disney, Toyota provided additional absorption above the highest side seats but contemplates no other physical changes. “It’s a modern sound, both transparent and warm, which is unusual,” says music director Esa-Pekka Salonen. “The sound is very, very good, especially the bass response, traditionally the hardest thing to achieve. It makes the whole orchestra sound more resonant and more intense.” J.S.R.

remained to be done. He claimed that changing course again might add as much as $30 million to the project. The letter also referred to Gehry’s difficult personal relationship with Broad, for whom he had designed a house. “Some people have said that 75 percent of my building is better than none,” Gehry wrote. “That’s the way you did your house, and you are satisfied. Maybe you can do it again. My obligation to myself and to the Disney family makes it impossible for me to agree to such a process.” The clash did not reach the impasse that many feared. “At stages in the process, Frank lost heart,” explained Steven Rountree, the Music Center’s president. “But he remained an active, passionate participant. He built alliances with the Disney family, the orchestra, and the board.” And these alliances paid off. Diane Disney Miller, the daughter of Lillian, who had taken an increasingly active role in the hall’s progress, had come to believe deeply in Gehry’s design. “We can’t let this go under,” she reportedly said to Mayor Richard Riordan. Riordan knew Gehry personally—they played hockey together—and he, too, had become a convert to the cause after a quiet trip to the Guggenheim Bilbao, which was nearing completion in Spain. (He would ultimately make a multimillion-dollar personal gift.) Andrea van de Kamp, the president of the Music Center’s board of directors, had also visited Bilbao with Randy Jefferson, one of the firm’s partners. “The experience is as close to an epiphany as I’ve ever had.” Bilbao, relatively free of cost surprises and construction snafus, reinforced Gehry’s claims that his firm could do the job for a predictable sum. “I knew that if we blew this opportunity, it was one we could never regain,” Van de Kamp said. She urgently summoned Zev Yaroslavsky, head of the county board of supervisors and a fellow symphonygoer. With his help, the city’s civic, business, and governmental community at last lined up behind the project. It was Disney Miller, however, who most prominently insisted on retaining Gehry’s firm to complete the design (backing her case with a substantial additional donation), and she prevailed. “I didn’t know Diane,” said Gehry, “and I asked her later

1. Stage 2. Chorus terrace
P H OTO G R A P H Y : C O U R T E SY G E H R Y PA R T N E R S ( O P P O S I T E , B OT TO M A N D M O D E L , T H I S PA G E ) ; © R O L A N D H A L B E ( O P P O S I T E , TO P )

To test Disney Hall’s unconventional design more precisely than permitted by computer models (sound diffuses more than the light beams computers use, says Toyota), carpenters made a model at one-tenth scale (opposite). They similarly

3. Chorus balcony 4. Front orchestra 5. Orchestra
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6. Balcony 7. Terrace
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Yellow cedar helps stage radiate sound

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5

4

1

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Steep seating rake increases visual intimacy

scaled down the acoustical properties of its materials. Toyota projected sounds inside the model at frequencies 10 times as

3

Curved front of seating tier dif fuses sound

high, picking up the results with dozens of tiny microphones. To “hear” the hall, he converted the recordings to normal frequencies.

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PERSPECTIVE PLAN

A skylight (opposite) draws patrons up from the parking structure to the lower lobby. A preconcert space, used for talks and chamber concerts (this page), extends the lobby.

GARDEN LEVEL

Grand Avenue

LOBBY LEVEL

N

0

50 FT. 15 M.

1. Entry plaza 2. Lobby 3. Preconcert 4. Lobby below 5. Café below 6. Auditorium 7. Founders Room

8. Library 9. Orchestra café 10. Practice 11. Choral hall 12. Office 13. Public garden 14. Amphitheater

Patrons entering at Grand Avenue (opposite) mix with those arriving from the garage (under skylight) amid lobby “tree” forms. They ascend the escalator at left

to arrive at the main lobby (above), which leads to three upper levels, each of which offers Piranesian vistas across the skylightdappled atria that wrap the auditorium.

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why she took my side. She said she saw it as a replay of when her father would be pushed around by the studios in creative disputes. She remembered the anxiety in the family when he’d come home after days of this. She correctly read the dispute over my control of the completion of the project as the same kind of game and she didn’t want it.” Work commenced on the project again in August 1997 with Gehry’s office in charge. Though the essential design had been firmed up by the end of 1991, Gehry was able to bring a new level of sculptural refinement to the interiors. Value engineers proposed a switch from exterior limestone cladding to less costly metal, over Gehry’s objections that the result would look like “son of Bilbao.” Later, he said he is happy with the change. A slablike office wing for the Los Angeles Philharmonic is added at the western edge of the site along with a 220-seat, multifunction performance space for the California Institute of the Arts, dubbed the REDCAT (for Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), but these both arrive with additional funding. Fund-raising took off as the economy rebounded and faith in Gehry and the new management solidified. (The tumultuous hosannas accompanying the October opening of the Bilbao Guggenheim greatly assisted.) Lillian Disney died at age 98. Realization of her great dream was still almost five years off.
PHOTOGRAPHY: © RICHARD BARNES (THIS PAGE AND PRECEDING SPREAD, LEFT); ROLAND HALBE (OPPOSITE AND PRECEDING SPREAD, RIGHT)

1999–2003: Construction resumes

Fears over additional delays due to the design’s complexity proved unwarranted. Partly this was because contractors and subcontractors had largely caught up with Gehry Partner’s expertise in CATIA in the intervening years. Builders relied on 3D steel-detailing systems and constructioncoordination models and animations. The post-Northridge seismic criteria resulted in a structural design that relied on a dense network of steel members, complicating work for mechanical trades that had to thread ductwork and other utilities through. New seismic requirements led to reinforcement of the garage. There was one final delay. “We held off opening for six months to get the orchestra into the hall,” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic Association’s general director. Wary that negative assessments by critics and musicians could damage a hall’s reputation for years, officials left nothing about the inauguration to chance. “Openings are precarious events,” added Gehry. (Everyone’s anxiety increased when the ambitious Kimmell Center [record, March 2002, page 106] opened in Philadelphia before its elaborate adjustable acoustic elements had been fully tuned—to some strongly negative reviews.) In June, the orchestra moved into the hall for a tuning period. Although the players were told that the process involved both the room

and the orchestra, the design has no adjustable elements, and no physical changes have been made. “The process is actually psychological,” Salonen told record. “We’re learning to play in the hall rather than change things.” At the first rehearsal, reported Cathleen McGuigan in Newsweek, Salonen turned to Gehry, sitting in the audience, and said, “We’ll keep it.” Gehry began to cry.
October 2003: After the ovations

Sources Metal cladding: Permasteelisa Roofing: Silplast Finish woodwork: Columbia

Decoustics
Carpet: Brittons Lighting: Lucifer; Kurt Versen;

Lithonia For more information on this project, go to Projects at www.architecturalrecord.com.

Showcase (Douglas fir and cedar)
Windows, curtain walls, skylights:

Permasteelisa; Super Sky Wall coverings: Hunter Douglas;
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Evidence of the tears and the years of anguished midnight telephone calls had vanished from Gehry’s appearance at a September interview. Speedwalking through the entrance lobby, he described the wood tree forms rising through three atrium levels, as well as the carpet, decorated in patterns of Frank Stella–like petals, as among the ways he honored Lillian Disney’s love of gardens. In the uppermost lobbies, he pointed out one of a dizzying number of bravura moments: how the canted walls explode upward into a raked grid of skylights over which soars the curving metal carapace of the external shells. Inside the hall, the 74-year-old architect scrambled energetically up steeply raked rows of seats to his favorite vantages. One is behind the orchestra next to the exquisitely crafted criss-crossed wooden spaghetti of organ pipes. Another is just below the monumental rear window that opens to a sliver of prismlike glass and metal outside. “It’s intimate, isn’t it?” he asks from this row most distant from the stage, still marveling that this dream he’s lived with so long has finally gotten built. He points out balconies hidden in corners behind the warping, wood-clad surfaces, where trumpets will fanfare or choral voices will rise unseen. Each of these spots is rich with sensuously detailed architectural incident. What does Disney mean to him now? “I’m on to the next thing. I need something new to be insecure about,” he replies. The first public performance occurred after record’s press deadline, but officials and observers exuded confidence in the acoustics as the opening neared. (In January, record will offer an acoustical and architectural evaluation.) Still, a project that took so long, cost so much ($274 million in the end), and took such a toll (both financially and personally) on two generations of the city’s civic leadership cannot help but remain controversial. Disney is opening at a dismal moment for the arts economy, especially for orchestras; several have folded in the past year alone. Will cheap CDs and digital downloads deep-six live, unamplified performances? Can the Philharmonic’s ambitious and diverse programming draw audiences from among Los Angeles’s racial, ethnic, and economic melting pot? Will the hall inject life into a downtown notoriously resistant to redevelopment? These are the challenges that lie beyond the early ovations. For Salonen, who arrived from Finland never expecting that he had signed on to such an epic undertaking, it’s time for reflection. “What this project has done for the orchestra is incredible. They now understand fully what a gift has been given to them. And now we’re working to show we’re worthy of it.” Would he take on such a project again? “It was such a profound experience that I don’t expect to have a similar one again.” Salonen is a very youthful looking 45, but he says wistfully, “I almost feel as if I’ve lived my life.” ■

The sculptural complexity of the lobby extends to the atria that access the upper levels (above and

below), lit by prismlike, glazed fissures. Drapelike plaster encloses the Founders Room (opposite).