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Los Angeles

Colburn School files plans for Gehry-designed auditorium

Private arts academy to invest $350M in campus near Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall

Colburn School president and CEO Seljuk Kardan and Frank Gehry with renderings of the project at 130 S Olive Street, LA (LA City Planning, Colburn School, Getty)
Colburn School president and CEO Seljuk Kardan and Frank Gehry with renderings of the project at 130 S Olive Street, LA (LA City Planning, Colburn School, Getty)

The Colburn School, an acclaimed private music and performing arts school in Downtown L.A., has filed plans for a campus expansion project designed by Frank Gehry’s architecture firm.

The school plans to build a 76,00-square-foot, six-story educational building, called the Colburn Center, that also includes an 1,100-seat concert hall and a smaller dance studio and rooftop terrace.

Gehry and the school announced the project partnership and unveiled some design plans at a press conference in March, although the project application hadn’t yet been filed with the city. Seljuk Kardan, the school’s president and CEO, then filed the project application in late August, and it was recorded with the planning department last week.

In a statement at the time, Gehry called the new performance hall “a major blessing for the music world of this city” and waxed about the project’s potential to “create a setting to nurture and grow the next generations of talent.” At the time Kardan and other Colburn School boosters also praised the $350 million project; in a statement Kardan referred to the future building as “a physical manifestation of the school’s founding principle of ‘access to excellence.’”

The expansion project is located at 130 South Olive Street, on what is currently a parking lot. Records show that an entity connected to The Colburn School bought the 1.3-acre site in 2016 for $31 million from System Property Development, a Sherman Oaks-based commercial real estate firm that has holdings in Greater L.A. as well as New York and elsewhere. That sale marked the first time the site had traded hands in two decades, according to records.

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The 76,000-square-foot proposal appears to be a reduction from the plans unveiled earlier this year, which called the project a 100,000-square-foot expansion. The new building, which will not add any parking, is located across the street from the school’s existing campus, which already has a significant footprint on South Grand Avenue near both the Broad Museum and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, another Gehry-designed structure.

The school’s existing, interconnected buildings total more than 420,000 square feet and include performance halls, rehearsal areas, practice rooms and a residence hall.

Gehry’s involvement in the expansion adds to the starchitect’s already major influence on a corridor of Downtown L.A. In addition to the Walt Disney Music Hall, which opened in 2003, Gehry designed “The Grand,” a major mixed-use complex that includes a luxury apartment tower, that opened this summer across the street.

Of the estimated $350 million price tag for the Colburn Center, the private school had already raised $270 million by this spring, according to the earlier release.

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Commercial Real EstateDowntown LA