Concert Hall Inside Out

Gehry's Miami Concert Hall is an outstanding example of an intense response to a client's radical redefinition of classical music and its presentation to the public. The video captures the client's enthusiasm for the "push" between their program and the creative problem solving that resulted in this unique structure that engages the public from the outside. This is based upon an old principle in theme park design: get people involved in the story of what is happening and draw them into the experience.

In this case, the "ride" is the musical experience that captures peoples' attention in short bursts and exposes them to longer performances inside the structure. It's very geared to today's dynamic interaction that happens in public spaces, art installations and on the internet; kind of an experiential mashup that defines a place in outdoor space that doesn't demand static attention. Instead, it throws music and images out into the trees and gardens and allows people to taste it first before committing to a longer experience. Thus it creates an outdoor, urban "art space" that acts as a connection between the public way, the garden and the interior of the structure itself. It's a fun linkage that lets people relax in a public space, then decide to enter the structure through a transparent glass facade, far different from the corporate experience of entering through a formal glass curtainwall directly from an urban street into a bland, boxy lobby.

What's also inside out are the swooping curves and disjointed forms that happen within the interior of a calm, rectangular structure, as opposed to the usual gesture from Gehry, those famously complex forms smashing into each other that spark peoples' interest in exploring the building. This dynamism happens after one is drawn into the structure through the glass facade. A further review and discussion of the structure is here at Bloomberg.