Walt Disney Concert Hall

Lillian Disney gave $50 million toward a concert hall in 1987, on the condition it be a gift to the musicians as much as the public; Gehry won the invited competition the same year, but financing, engineering and a public backlash over the projected cladding cost stalled construction so completely that the site sat as a parking garage for a decade before ground finally broke in 1999. The most consequential decision was made backwards from the acoustics rather than the facade: the Japanese acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota designed a vineyard-style chamber in wood, and Gehry's steel-shell exterior was then wrapped around it as an independent, structurally isolated building-within-a-building, so the curved metal skin everyone photographs plays no part in shaping the sound inside. An early limestone cladding scheme was replaced by brushed stainless steel after cost overruns on Bilbao's titanium proved the material could be handled at this scale, and after the completed hall's first polished panels were found to reflect sunlight hot enough to raise nearby sidewalk temperatures and blind drivers, forcing a re-buffing of the whole exterior in 2005. Frank Gehry called it, on completion in 2003, the best work of his career.