With the financial support of The Walt Disney Company and the County of Los Angeles, the Concert Hall’s architect, Frank Gehry, whose children graduated from CalArts, was asked to design the new venue as part of the complex.

At the time of REDCAT’s conception in the early 1990s, then CalArts President Steven D. Lavine cited the pairing of experimentation in the arts with a public space for artist-community engagement as the primary consideration for the venue design and its role as a laboratory for the Institute.

[1] Lavine additionally expressed an institutional ambition for CalArts to contribute to the local community and participate in a broader dialogue about emerging forms of art and performance.

This bifurcated leadership start was the impetus that propelled initiatives for commissioned works, artist residencies, collaborations, and public programs for the Theater and Gallery as parallel and separate from each other rather than per its original conception as a unified laboratory of CalArts.

In the 2002 architecture book Gehry: The City and Music, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, a former faculty member at CalArts, describes REDCAT as a performance space located within the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Noticing an exhibit on display, Goldman found the installation Falha (Failure) by Brazilian artist Renata Lucas to be austere, and there were no labels or wall text to explain the artwork.

[10] In a 2013 TEDTalk, Goldman disclosed that WDCH's architect Gehry was the first art professional he met in Los Angeles when he initially immigrated to the United States.