The Walt Disney Concert Hall, which recently opened in Los Angeles, culminates and synthesizes several strong directions in contemporary architecture: a new freedom, unleashed by digital technology; society’s need for cultural expression; Los Angeles’s advancing urban trajectory; Frank Gehry’s personal maturity as artist and architect, and the increasing mastery of the men and women who practice with him. Like the symphonic music it houses, the structure of Disney Hall knits together individual motifs, offering a coherent, polyphonic whole in a single, compelling work emblematic of this moment’s whirling, unrealized aspirations.

Like other great works of architecture, the Disney Hall invites analogies, including comparisons to music. Several immediately come to mind. With its centralized, spectacular organ and broad, oval interior focused on a central stage; with its propensity to soar spatially and to embellish a spare volume with particular details; with its tendency toward ascendance and resolution, the interior of the Disney recalls the Baroque: the Bach of the St. Matthew’s Passion or the chorales.