Dorothy Chandler was not a professional fundraiser, a politician, or a developer. She was the wife of the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and she decided that her city needed a world-class performing arts center. In the late 1950s she launched a personal fundraising campaign that eventually gathered approximately $20 million from private donors — enough to prove to county government that the civic will existed to build something significant. The performing arts center that bears her name opened on December 6, 1964. Forty years later, the building next door would be named for Walt Disney's widow. Between them, the Music Center campus became the cultural anchor of downtown Los Angeles.
The Pavilion seats 3,197 and opened in 1964 as the centerpiece of the first phase of Music Center construction. For decades it served as the primary venue for the Academy Awards — the Oscars were held there from 1969 to 1987, and then again for selected years in the 1990s (1990, 1992–1994, 1996, and 1999), giving the building a national profile that extended well beyond its regular programming.
The Pavilion is the home of the Los Angeles Opera, which was founded in 1986 and today ranks as the fourth-largest opera company in the United States. It also houses the Los Angeles Master Chorale and, until the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall, was the primary home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The building's acoustics have always been considered adequate rather than exceptional — a limitation that the Philharmonic accepted for nearly four decades before moving to a hall designed from the ground up for orchestral sound.
The second phase of construction, completed in 1967, added two more venues. The Ahmanson Theatre, seating between 1,600 and 2,007 depending on configuration, serves as the Music Center's large-house venue for touring Broadway productions and major theatrical events. The Mark Taper Forum seats 739 in a thrust stage configuration that puts audiences on three sides of the playing area — a format that emphasizes intimacy in a space that operates in the same complex as the largest venues on the campus.
Center Theatre Group, the resident company that operates both the Taper and the Ahmanson, has developed and produced some of the most significant American plays of the past half-century. Angels in America, The Kentucky Cycle, Children of a Lesser God — works that began at the Taper before reaching Broadway and national audiences.
Frank Gehry designed Walt Disney Concert Hall over a period spanning roughly fifteen years — the design was commissioned in 1988, construction began in 1999, and the building opened on October 23, 2003. The result is one of the most celebrated pieces of architecture in the world: stainless steel panels that billow and curve above Grand Avenue, creating a building that looks, depending on the light and the angle, like sails, or petals, or the inside of a musical instrument.
The hall seats 2,265 and its acoustics, designed by Nagata Acoustics, are routinely ranked among the best for orchestral performance in the world. For the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which had spent four decades playing in the Chandler Pavilion while other major orchestras occupied purpose-built halls, the move to Disney Hall was a transformation — the difference between performing in a good room and performing in a great one.
The Music Center's fifth venue, REDCAT — the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater — occupies a corner of the Disney Hall building and seats 266 in a black box configuration. It presents avant-garde and experimental work that would not find a home in the larger venues, functioning as the campus's laboratory for new performance.
Together the five venues host more than 1.3 million visitors annually. The Music Center sits at the top of Bunker Hill, at the intersection of Grand Avenue and First Street, looking south toward the rest of downtown. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, the LA Opera, the LA Master Chorale, and Center Theatre Group — four of the major performing arts institutions in the Western United States — share this campus. The woman who made it possible raised the money herself, before there was a building to show anyone.
The Los Angeles Music Center occupies the northern end of Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, at the corner of Grand Avenue and First Street. Walt Disney Concert Hall's stainless steel exterior is immediately identifiable from the air — a curved silver structure adjacent to the more rectilinear Chandler Pavilion and Ahmanson Theatre. The campus is visible on the western edge of the downtown civic center cluster.