MM: It was an amazing and incredible project for me. If you go to work for a larger firm in a new city, the chances are few and far between
that what you work on will be so significant to your adopted city. Generally you work on some high rise in another country. Working on a project that makes you think intimately about this new city we'd moved to was an incredible opportunity -- how the city sees itself socially and culturally. Being involved with people who were simultaneously
thinking as deeply about those issues just made it one of the really great experiences that I could ever imagine, it was a rare opportunity.
Frank's work has changed radically at periods on a fairly consistent basis, and he does that because he continues to move. I think he would say it's not so much that he's making radical breaks, it's just because it's the next step for him. Because it leaves everyone else behind, it seems like a radical break. It was at a time when the work was shifting from projects more like the Air and Space Museum or Loyola Law School to something that was probably going to become Bilbao, EMR and those projects. The Vitra Design Museum that Greg worked on came before, and that set the table. I can remember walking into that office and thinking since I had seen projects like the Indiana Avenue Studios and Loyola and thought, "I can figure out how to do this" (laughs). I walked in and saw the model of Vitra and almost turned around and walked right out because I thought, "Oh my god, I have no idea how to even possibly imagine what this project means." Now when you look at it, it seems very simple compared to where the work went. The thing that was fascinating about Disney Hall was not only that it was a project about discovering the emergence of Los Angeles, but also discovering an emergent language in Frank's work.

V5: Do you think that shift left some of the team members behind? When Frank Gehry talked about the Disney Concert Hall in relationship with Dworsky and the sort of partnership that needed to be formed, he said it was like speaking another language, there was no shared critical base
that allowed for joint development.

MM: I think that is probably true and that if everyone involved in that project could go back and do it again, I think the team would have been
very different.

V5: Different mind set or different people?

MM: Both, I think the project demanded different sensibilities. It has nothing to do with the technical abilities of anybody, which it has often been described as. I think it just needed more sympathetic sensibilities and a greater understanding of what was trying to be achieved.

It was a big project  with a lot of constituencies. All of those constituencies had a kind of political and ego share of that project. Because of that, unfortunately, the project was a kind of pawn for a
number of years, where it was the rope in a tug of war between a number of entities that were much bigger than the design team or the building itself. That's unfortunate, and that was the downside of what I learned about Los Angeles politics.

The  Maltzan Studio, mid work day. (photo credit -  Han Hoang)

Digital Experience -  Getty Center, completed 1998            (photo credit: Joshua White)