Frank Gehry and his team engaged in an unprecedented traffic between handcraft and digital tooling in developing designs for the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
At the project’s inception, the building’s exterior form was to be worked out through an iterative process of constructing models by hand. With the concert hall shoebox at the center, the building’s various programmatic requirements were fleshed out with hand-cut elements in wood representing stairs, elevators, mechanical systems, offices, and other “secondary” spaces. Placed on the site, these various elements together suggested how the concert hall’s monumental form could be broken down to meet the urban context at a more human scale.
