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 [log in to unmask]