Gehry, who also created the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, will design most of the buildings in the $500 million first phase of the project, which aims to transform downtown into a residential and retail hub. Redevelopment officials are trading on the celebrity of Gehry's name to press for project approvals and redefine the character of the neighborhood.
"The initial dream was to have it be our Champs-Elysees," Stan Ross, chairman of the University of Southern California's Lusk Center for Real Estate, said in an interview. "Gehry could fulfill that."
The Grand Avenue Project will test Gehry's penchant for designing fantastical buildings with the practical need to create an area that functions as a neighborhood, said Harrison Fraker, dean of the College of Environmental Design at University of California, Berkeley.
"What you're looking for is good housing, good retail and good mixed-use," Fraker said. "How many icons can you have before they start competing with each other?"
Revival
The project will continue a revival of Los Angeles that began with the 1999 opening of the Staples Center sports arena. Since then, about 3,760 apartment and condominium units have been built downtown in the second-biggest U.S. city.
"Downtown is coming back," said Jack Kyser, executive director of the nonprofit Los Angeles Economic Development Corp. "Private sector jobs are growing. Office vacancies are going down. It's an outright boom in residential development."
The Grand Avenue project is planned to coincide with the creation of a $50 million, 16-acre park that would connect Los Angeles City Hall and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power building. The plan proposed by Related Cos. hugs the park, which would run the length of four city blocks.
"They are trying to make Grand Avenue a more friendly street for all hours, which it currently isn't," Gehry, 76, said. "This project is just one step toward doing that."
The architect
The five-member Los Angeles Grand Avenue Authority, comprised of city and county officials, voted unanimously to back New York-based Related's plan for the site in August, choosing the closely held company over Forest City Enterprises Inc.
"It was kind of known that Related had picked Gehry to design the project," Councilwoman Jan Perry, a Grand Avenue Authority board member, said in an interview. "It may have impacted the approval."
The project, which will include two-to-four story retail pavilions and a hotel-condominium tower, is scheduled to take about seven years to complete. Gehry, a Toronto native who moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s, said he will try to instill the "friendly, inviting" feel of Disney Hall in his designs, making downtown "more open and accessible."
Gehry's record of helping redesign areas of downtown for at least 10 years helped convince Related Cos. that he was the right planner, company president Bill Witte said.
Gehry, who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, said he began studying architecture at night when he was 18, driving a truck during the day to support himself.