The Walt Disney Concert Hall

There is not much parking in very many parts of the Los Angeles Landscape. The Walt Disney Music Hall is no exception to this disturbing and very permanent trend.
I parked my car about two abnormally large blocks from Concert Hall and thus what was intended to be the making of a very thoughtful piece of writing on an important piece of architecture was started pounding the pavement.
From far away near my car I can see the Concert Hall as I had envisioned seeing it as a shining silver grouping of warped structures pointed and twisted each almost to a point, like a bears claw. A myriad of crescents and gnarls, sharp points and seductive curls and curves moving individually of each other and each with its own type of line movement and character. As I moved closer and closer to the Concert Hall and could clearly view it as a singular piece, I could see that my ideas about it before had been wrong. They were not a collection of independently moving sickles; they were a collective group of dips, crevices, creases, curls, curves and blunt points folding in on each other in a collective form.
I gathered my breath from a very steep walk uphill and began my exploration of the exterior of the concert hall having no previous information about the place other than that once it reflected enough light to cause pavement to be unbearably hot and for air conditioning bills in the area to skyrocket. The building was since refinished. I was relieved to see parts of the building that had not been refinished since I never got the opportunity to see the texture of the previous finish up close. From the front of the steps the building takes you around towards a garden on the other side of the building on the inside of the walls. The garden had heaps of blooming flowers and leaves of several different colors. The centerpiece of the garden is a large fresco blue and white fountain made out of what appear to be antique dishes. One the flower was inscribed “A Rose For Lilly – Frank Ghery’s Tribute to Lillian Disney – A Gift of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.” The Memorial flower fountain was touching in a very saccharine and predictable way. How nice that in a Concert Hall named for Walt Disney that they could include a very small and obscurely placed nod to his wife, Lillian Disney. Lillian Disney owned and operated an antique store on the Disneyland grounds for years so it was very appropriate that the fountain was made up of antique plates. I left the fountain and continued on a path going further into the Concert Hall grounds. Not too long after I had left the rose fountain I arrived at a very large silver spiral. The movements of the viewer around the property are meant to mimic the movement of the spiral. The memorial fountain I had seen before merely served as a signature marker for a larger memorial piece. The Walt Disney Concert Hall is not a bear claw or a collection of odd forms conceived by a person who crumbles up paper bags and uses them as models, but it is a deliberate representation of a very large silver rose built for a woman who donated 50 Million Dollars towards the construction of the Music Hall. Everything about the buildings, the movement of the oddly shaped crescents of the building everything was built to mimic the structure of the rose. A rose is a maze and a spiral into itself. The Hall was built to amplify the simple gesture of giving a woman a rose.