Across the street from Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, retail remains more than half empty at the Gehry-designed Grand LA.
Photographer: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Can Frank Gehry’s ‘Grand LA’ Make Downtown Feel Like a Neighborhood?
A major mixed-use development designed by Gehry introduced housing across from the architect’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. But retail has been slow to follow.
Early in 2018, architect Frank Gehry unveiled his firm’s final design for a complex in downtown Los Angeles that, after nearly two decades of planning and financing delays, was finally — finally — on the verge of breaking ground. The plan for the Grand LA included a hotel, residential tower, movie theater and a mix of dining and retail spaces, promising to bring some life to a neighborhood that is largely institutional in nature and replace a dire open-air parking structure that had inhabited the site for half a century.
For Gehry, the Grand LA wasn’t simply a chance to work on a prominent complex. (Part of a larger downtown project led by the Related Companies, the developer behind New York City’s Hudson Yards, the Grand LA occupies a whole city block and comes with a price tag of $1 billion.) It was also an opportunity to build a companion to Walt Disney Concert Hall, the swooping Gehry-designed home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic that opened to wide acclaim in 2003, and whose success made the continuing presence of that parking lot an ongoing civic embarrassment. So as not to overwhelm Disney with a single behemoth structure, Gehry’s team broke up the program into a pair of irregularly stacked towers set back from Grand Avenue, with commercial spaces that are stepped back from the street over several stories to maintain a human scale at sidewalk level.