Frank Gehry selected to design Colburn School Expansion
By David Malone, Associate Editor
The Colburn School has selected Frank Gehry to join the all-L.A. team for the campus’s downtown Los Angeles expansion.
The project will add three performance venues, an outdoor performance area, classrooms, a dance rehearsal center, and student and guest artist housing. The largest of the new venues will be the 1,100-seat concert hall, the Colburn School’s first venue for full-scale orchestra performances.
A 700-seat flexible studio theater for dance and vocal performance and a 100-seat cabaret-style space are also included. The 700-seat Studio Theater is envisioned as a hybrid courtyard-style theater that will accommodate multiple seating configurations and can serve as a special events space with banquet seating for up to 500. The cabaret-style club space will be used for small-ensemble performances of amplified and non-amplified music.
The new expansion will be constructed on a parcel of land between South Olive and Hill Streets and comprise approximately 200,000 sf. The Colburn School Expansion will mark the third building in the immediate area designed by Gehry. The others include the Walt Disney Concert Hall and a mixed-use project he is designing for the Related Companies.
Yosuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics and Michael Ferguson, Principal of TheatreDNA will collaborate with Gehry on the project.