Financial Times / February 27, 2001
   The Arts

   A CURVED STEEL PHOENIX IS RISING IN THE WEST:
   The Los Angeles Philharmonic's new home has been a long time in the
   making

   By Martin Bernheimer

   The date was December 6, 1964.  Sprawling Los Angeles, the
   self-proclaimed City of Angels, was celebrating what looked
   for all impractical purposes like a cultural graduation.

   The social elite and the county fathers had built a lavish, patently
   conservative temple of art, a 3,200-seat concert hall atop Bunker
   Hill in the civic wasteland that passed for downtown.  Price tag:
   $34.4 million.  This architectural ode to conspicuous consumption
   was called the Music Center.  It provided a much-needed home for the
   Los Angeles Philharmonic and, not incidentally, for its vaunted new
   maestro, Zubin Mehta.  The structure also served as a retort of sorts
   from the Wild West to the Tame East.  New York, after all, had recently
   opened a fancy new auditorium at Lincoln Center, and suffered the
   embarrassment of a sonic disaster.

   <snip>

   http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=020227001526&query=bernheimer

Janos Gereben/SF
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