The Colburn School just marked a major construction landmark for its new performing arts complex in Downtown Los Angeles.
The music school has topped out the Colburn Center, a Frank Gehry-designed music venue and rehearsal facility at 130 Olive Street in Bunker Hill, L.A. Business First reported. The expansion totals 100,000 square feet and is estimated to cost $335 million.
The development is on schedule to open two years from now, according to Colburn School President and CEO Sel Kardan.
“You can really get a sense of the scale of the building now,” Kardan told Business First of the project’s size. “We’re excited to mark this milestone.”
The school first began looking for land on which to build the expansion in 2012. It broke ground on the Colburn Center last April. Once complete, the expansion will create the largest concentration of Gehry-designed buildings in the world alongside his Walt Disney Concert Hall down the street and The Grand LA mixed-use development.
The Colburn Center will feature a pink metallic finish and two gardens at the street and rooftop levels on the exterior. Inside, the project encompasses a 1,000-seat concert hall, a 100-seat theater for dance, four dance studios and a bevy of teaching and support facilities.
The school is also relocating its dance program into a new wing of the building designed as a dance education center, the Trudl Zipper Dance Institute. The new digs will have five studios, each almost twice the size of any existing Colburn studio. The new concert venue will supplement the campus’ 430-seat Zipper Hall and 189-seat Thayer Hall.
“From a programming standpoint, we had two principal priorities: to create a medium-size concert hall that would fill the space in L.A. between a smaller hall and then something much larger like Walt Disney Concert Hall, and to expand our dance education component,” Kardan told Business First.
Colburn students, orchestras and bands as well as children’s choirs and dancers will have access to the new concert hall. It will also be available to local and touring ensembles, such as the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and L.A. Dance Project.
The Colburn Center is slated for completion in September 2027.