1999 Interview on 60 Minutes Art Critic and Columbia University Professor Rosalind Kraus

Frank Gehry once heard fellow architect Philip Johnson say that the purest form of exploration in their profession, their version of a blank sail or a single sheet of newspaper, was the 1-room edifice. To back up the theory, he cited Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, French republic'due south Chartres Cathedral and — modesty never being Johnson's strong adjust — his own 1949 Drinking glass House in New Canaan, Conn.

Gehry took the idea to heart, designing a series of houses that were miniature villages in which each room became, in essence, its own structure. But he's never had a hazard to explore the potential of single-room architecture quite as directly as in Pierre Boulez Hall in Berlin, which he designed in collaboration with pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim.

The projection has been one of near-obsessive interest over the final iv years for the classical music-loving Gehry, and that is one reason the compages and music critics who follow his work have been then eager to see information technology. (He waived his usual fee.) But the final product never quite strikes the unusual balance of refined and unrefined spaces, of humanism and careful proportion set against the advertizing hoc and the thrown together, that marks his almost effective designs.

The hall opened Saturday nighttime with a concert of sleeping accommodation music and art song by Boulez, Schubert, Mozart, Alban Berg and Jörg Widmann that stretched more than than three hours and drew a rousing response from an audition including German President Joachim Gauck, architect Rafael Viñoly, curator Stephanie Barron and Los Angeles Philharmonic President and Principal Executive Deborah Borda.

The 682-seat hall is tucked into ane corner of a 4-story building from 1955 that was designed by builder Richard Paulick to shop sets for the Berlin State Opera, where Barenboim is music director. The building, which sits rather anonymously on a corner in the Mitte district, in the heart of Berlin, backing up to an important borough plaza chosen Bebelplatz, is now the headquarters for the Barenboim-Said Academy, a conservatory that includes immature Israeli and Arab musicians.

The academy has its roots in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which Barenboim founded in 1999 with the belatedly Palestinian American author and Columbia University professor Edward Said.

The building is split almost perfectly down the center by a tall, narrow atrium. On ane side are offices and rehearsal spaces for the academy. On the other is Boulez Hall, named for the French composer and usher who was close to both Barenboim and Gehry and who died last twelvemonth at age 90.

The name of the auditorium in High german, Pierre Boulez Saal, reflects its architectural personality. The discussion "Saal" means both hall and room. And, of course, much of the chamber music that will exist performed at that place was written for living rooms and other small spaces.

The hall is easily reconfigurable for concerts and rehearsals. (Volker Kreidler)

Because the redesign of the rest of the 1955 building (including the administrative space for the university) was handled by a German office, HG Merz, Gehry could focus all his attention on the operation space, which covers just 10,660 square feet. His collaborators on the project at his firm, Gehry Partners, included Craig Webb, Laurence Tighe, Meaghan Lloyd and Gesa Buettner. The total upkeep for auditorium and academy was $36 million.

Working with acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, who also handled the remarkably skilful sound blueprint for Gehry's 2003 Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the builder produced a clubby gem box of a pattern that is also a sophisticated machine for delivering audio.

The walls and ceiling are wrapped, more than seamlessly than at Disney, in panels of Douglas fir, though you can come across correct through the windows of the sometime building to the street. Earlier performances, shades slide downwards to block out the light. They reopen during intermissions, which is a nice impact.

The most striking and unusual characteristic of the hall is its sunken phase, which isn't actually a stage at all as much every bit a clearing, nine feet below entry level and surrounded by an oval-shaped arrangement of v rows of seats. A balcony with ii rows — largely discrete from the construction of the larger room, so that sound can travel up under and around it — forms another oval in a higher place.

It's a remarkably intimate space for music. Every seat is within l anxiety of the stage.

The blueprint is much closer to a theater in the round than a traditional concert hall; even at Disney Hall, which likewise puts the audience in a ring around the performers, in that location are some seats that dip beneath the stage.

Here, the outset row of seats is straight level with the musicians and their instruments. Audience members in those seats put their feet on the same surface the performers do, just like Jack Nicholson at a Lakers game.

Another unusual characteristic is the ease with which the musicians can be repositioned as a concert unfolds. When he wasn't at the piano, Barenboim conducted from two different edges of the stage over the course of the Saturday performance as well as from the balcony.

That sense of openness and flexibility — an interest in rejecting the monumental or doctrinaire — connects the hall'southward compages with that of the Berlin Philharmonie, a vivid 1963 design past Hans Scharoun that heavily influenced Disney Hall. As an interior project, the hall is linked to Gehry's only other blueprint in Berlin, the 2000 Deutsche Bank offices nigh the Brandenburg Gate.

At that place are also hints here of Alvar Aalto and — especially correct when you lot walk in and encounter the sunken stage area lighted from in a higher place as if by some giant subconscious skylight — of Karl Friedrich Schinkel'south 1816 Neue Wache, a crypt-like building two blocks from Boulez Hall that has a circular, Pantheon-like opening in its ceiling.

The glass acoustical sails that are suspended beneath the balcony — though delicately detailed enough to avoid continuing out — are among a handful of signs in the last pattern that Gehry's interest in making nearly every major architectural form acoustical and vice versa, which is one of Disney Hall's keen strengths, wound up just out of reach in Berlin.

On the whole, the Gehry on brandish here is a tamed, or at least tempered, version of the ane who so memorably combined that wood-lined interior in Disney Hall with floral upholstery whose busy pattern seemed marshaled to tweak the aesthetic sensibilities of L.A. Phil subscribers.

That endeavor was even more pronounced in Gehry's very good 2011 edifice for the New World Symphony in Miami, which has entrance hall banquettes covered in aqua-blue Naugahyde. Boulez Hall has seats in a more muted blue and red pattern.

The performance space is tucked into one corner (at far correct in this prototype) of an existing building in primal Berlin. (Volker Kreidler)

In other means — more important ways — that sense of the irreconcilable lies at the heart of Boulez Hall both architecturally and culturally. The outer walls of the hall brand up a box that's virtually a cube. The gestures that Gehry makes inside that box are annihilation simply predictably rational. In fact, they seem distrustful of the style that architectural symmetry can make an easy or saccharine argument for harmony.

Instead, he makes the stage an oval and so suspends some other, larger oval to a higher place to hold the balcony. The balcony itself is an undulating form, dipping toward the phase on two sides.

So in program (as seen from above) and in section (as seen looking across or through the building), the pattern for the hall is a collection of stretched, ill-matched or distorted ovals, suggesting the difficulty of achieving some architectural version of musical harmony.

One of Gehry'due south early sketches for the design, from 2012, is reproduced in a display in the entrance hall and appeared on the encompass of the program booklet Saturday nighttime; in that version, the overlapping ovals advise a hurricane, with the phase in the heart representing the center of the storm.

The hall every bit congenital is missing some of that sense of turbulence; that troubled early geometry has been smoothed out, which is a disappointment. Gehry, later on all, has oft mined to great effect the vein where beauty (or proportion) and harshness come up together or where beauty can no longer sustain itself. Or where it'southward merely an inappropriate response.

Still, the symbolism of those clashing ovals closely matches the spirit both of Boulez's music and Barenboim'south vision for the academy and the Due west-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

Barenboim has stressed over the years that his goal in bringing together Arab and Israeli musicians is non to make peace or even suggest that it'due south within reach; he is not every bit naive as that. Instead, he wants to create a platform for connection and appointment, one necessarily shadowed past feet about political reality.

"It's an experiment," Barenboim acknowledges in an interview published in the programme. "Just … nosotros have to put all cards on the table and say, 'This is what this hall is about.' "

christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com

Twitter: @HawthorneLAT

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