Enlarge image Photo by Whit Preston, courtesy of Frank O. Gehry & Associates.      WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL Los Angeles 1987– The Walt Disney Concert Hall—the future home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic adjacent to the extant Music Center—is Gehry's most ambitious project in Los Angeles to date. The concert hall is conceived as part of the cultural hub in the center of downtown Los Angeles, an area that is home to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Like many of Gehry's larger public structures, the hall is intended to establish a sense of place. This is accomplished not only by the extensive gardens and outdoor performance spaces, but also by the building's distinctive design. In the years since Gehry was awarded the project, its design has undergone considerable revisions, including an evolution from a stone exterior to the current iteration in fluid stainless steel. Gehry's design for the concert hall provides striking evidence of his commitment to creating functional buildings that serve his clients. The original proposal defined the central auditorium as a cluster of intimate boxes opening onto the performance area. This initial design underwent significant modifications as the architect consulted with acousticians, several prominent classical musicians, and the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Further design produced an auditorium that is shaped like a convex box—bowed in the middle and raised on either end—a structure tailored to convey orchestral sound as effectively as possible. The movement in the surfaces of the auditorium crescendos in the building's exterior, where the boxy hall is enveloped by a stainless-steel wrapper that flutters and swoops around its perimeter.