Frank Gehry's impact on the Grand Avenue cultural corridor in Downtown Los Angeles keeps growing: 15 years after completing the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall, and with the enormous The Grand mixed-use development right across the street finally coming to realization, Gehry was today also selected to design the campus expansion of the Colburn School, an internationally renowned institution teaching music, dance, and drama.

The existing Colburn School campus, built by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates in 1998, is located at the corner of Grand Avenue and 2nd Street, flanked by the Arata Isozaki-designed Museum of Contemporary Art building and The Broad by DS+R.

The campus expansion site, only a stone's throw away on 2nd Street between South Olive and Hill Streets, will be transformed from a parking lot on a hill side into a new state-of-the-art multi-venue building. Featuring a 1,100-seat concert hall, a 700-seat studio theater, and a 100-seat cabaret-style space, the new campus will give the school its first hall for full-size orchestra performances, a venue for its emerging dance program and for opera. Spaces for classrooms, rehearsal, and housing will be included as well.

"The expansion of the Colburn School fills an important addition to the long-held dream to create a cultural district in downtown Los Angeles," Frank Gehry said. "The school is already an incredible asset and major player, and the expansion is a great opportunity to add breadth to this dream. I am honored to be chosen for this task, and I feel that it is an opportunity to further increase the school’s relationship to other cultural venues like The Music Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Broad, and MOCA. The young musicians, dancers, and performing artists will add to the vitality and excitement of the existing cultural organizations. What we all dreamed about twenty years ago is now becoming within reach, and we will do our best to make it a proud addition."

Gehry will be collaborating with Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics (acoustician for projects including the Walt Disney Concert Hall and more recently the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg) and Michael Ferguson, principal of TheatreDNA (formally of Theater Projects, where he consulted on Gehry’s New World Center in Miami Beach and Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College).