Ideas for Accessorizing Disney Hall

How do you dress up a curvaceous concert hall with stainless-steel skin?

The answer, among those choosing public artwork for downtown’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, may be a king-sized white collar and bow tie, along with a tall pair of abstract steel sculptures.

With the concert hall’s fall 2003 opening date still more than a year away, officials at the Music Center, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the offices of architect Frank O. Gehry stress that no final decisions have been made on the landmark building’s public art and that money for the projects is uncertain.

But at a symposium on Disney Hall on Saturday, Gehry told a full auditorium at the Getty Center that he has high hopes for works by sculptors Richard Serra and the husband-and-wife team of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen and that planners already have sites in mind.

Though the architect didn’t go into detail Saturday, Gehry spokesman Keith Mendenhall said Monday that the contribution under discussion from Oldenburg and Van Bruggen is a giant white collar and bow tie, perhaps 25 feet high, that would be placed near the building’s entrance at Grand Avenue and 1st Street. Mendenhall added that “we’ve been talking about Oldenburg [and Van Bruggen] for quite a long time,” and that the artists have already executed a model of the work.

Oldenburg, born in Sweden and raised in the U.S., is most widely known for his works magnifying familiar household shapes to epic scale. In 1991, Oldenburg and his wife, Dutch sculptor and curator Van Bruggen, collaborated with Gehry on the outsized pair of black binoculars that form the entrance to the building on Main Street in Venice that once served as offices of the Chiat-Day advertising firm.

The proposed Serra contribution, which Mendenhall said is a more recent addition, would be a pair of 45-foot-high works made of Cor-Ten steel, to be placed along the Grand Avenue side of the hall.

Serra, widely known as a creator of large works of steel and lead, often for public places, is a longtime friend of Gehry and is the creator of a major installation inside Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Titled “Snake,” the Serra work at Bilbao weighs 174 tons and measures 13 feet high and 104 feet long--an interior complement to the building’s curving titanium exterior. Gehry has credited Serra for introducing him to the town of Bilbao, before the Guggenheim museum had any plans to build there, and Serra has borrowed Gehry’s computer design system.

Though Gehry is friendly with all three of the proposed artists, Mendenhall said, “typically, when it comes to placement of art, we aren’t very directly involved. Usually our clients come up with it and present it to us after the fact. Certainly Frank advised, but it’s possible that he wasn’t the source.”

Still open, however, are questions about approving and paying for the artworks. A spokeswoman for the Music Center said that organization is creating an art committee to look more closely at issues of choosing and paying for art at the site. The money to pay for it will be raised outside the hall’s $274-million budget.

“We will have to figure out how to raise that money,” said Catherine Babcock, director of marketing and communications for the Music Center. There is no estimate for what such works will cost, she said, adding that the proposals remain in a “conceptual discussion phase.”