Frank Gehry's New World Symphony Space Opens To High Praise

Master architect Frank Gehry’s home for Miami’s New World Symphony opens today to critical reviews. Many say the symphonic masterpiece is Gehry’s best work in years. The purpose of New World Symphony, founded by Michael Tilson Thomas and Ted Arison in 1987, is to combat the notion that classical music is stuffy and irrelevant to modern young people.

Miami’s Riptide 2.0 pulls out the greatest accolades about Frank Gehry’s masterpiece.

From the NY Times’Nicolai Ouroussoff:

The story reflects Mr. Gehry’s belief that music, like other creative endeavors, should be more than an aesthetic matter. As a shared experience, one that reaches each of us at our emotional core, it helps unite us into a civilized community. This is probably why it’s the first Gehry building I have fallen in love with in years — not because it is perfect but because of the values it embodies.

From the WashPo’s Philip Kennicott

Gehry’s concert hall for the New World Symphony, an elite training orchestra that is one of the most innovative musical organizations in the country, is the first American concert space built from the ground up to include sophisticated video, theater-style lighting and flexible stage space that can accommodate not just an orchestra, but soloists and chamber groups. It also happens to be one of Gehry’s best buildings in years, an introspective structure that gathers the wisdom of his earlier work on concert halls in Los Angeles and in Upstate New York.

From the L.A. Times’ Christopher Hawthorne

Throughout the $160-million concert hall, set to open officially Tuesday evening, the interplay between rectangular containers and their virtuosic architectural contents gives the design a shifting, unpredictable vitality. This is a piece of architecture that dares you to underestimate it or write it off at first glance. In the middle of Miami Beach, a city that, like certain parts of Los Angeles, has nearly perfected the art of aggressive displays of individual beauty — pneumatic, Botoxed, dyed and otherwise — it is content to focus on the richness of its interior life.

Learn more details at New World Symphony’s website.

images via World Architecture News