With the Walt Disney Concert Hall being a project that demanded a high budget and an elegant style, Gehry did not seem like the right candidate for the job.

Plans were revised, and in a cost-saving move the originally designed stone exterior was replaced with a less costly stainless steel skin.

The County expected to repay the garage debts by revenue coming from the Disney Hall parking users.

For example, the box columns on the north side of the Walt Disney Concert Hall are tilted forward at seventeen degrees.

As construction finished in the spring of 2003, the Philharmonic postponed its grand opening until the fall and used the summer to let the orchestra and Master Chorale adjust to the new hall.

[11] During the summer rehearsals a few hundred VIPs were invited to sit in including donors, board members and journalists.

Toyota says that he had never experienced such an acoustical difference between a first and second rehearsal in any of the halls he designed in his native Japan.

[citation needed] As he was designing the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gehry committed to producing a building that would promote the best acoustics possible.

Gehry reduced the wavelength of the sounds by a factor of ten in order to discover how his design would respond to the orchestras that would later perform in it to provide the best possible acoustics.

[15] Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority had an agreement with the Los Angeles Music Center to use the most advanced noise-suppression measures for construction of the Regional Connector subway under 2nd Street where it passes the hall and the Colburn School of Music.

Metro used procedures to ensure that the rumble of trains did not intrude on the sound quality of recordings made in the venues or mar audiences' musical experience within this sensitive stretch of the tunnel.

Metro also built an elevated walkway from the Grand Avenue Arts/Bunker Hill station to the concert hall.

Some residents of the neighboring condominiums suffered glare caused by sunlight that was reflected off these surfaces and concentrated in a manner similar to a parabolic mirror.

The resulting heat made some rooms of nearby condominiums unbearably warm, caused the air-conditioning costs of these residents to skyrocket and created hot spots on adjacent sidewalks of as much as 140 °F (60 °C).

After complaints from neighboring buildings and residents, the owners asked Gehry Partners to come up with a solution.

Then, Gehry came up with the curved wooden pipe concept, "like a logjam kind of thing," says Rosales, "turned sideways."

It has an attached console built into the base of the instrument from which the pipes of the Positive, Great, and Swell manuals (keyboards) are playable by direct mechanical, or "tracker" key action, with the rest playing by electric key action;[22] this console somewhat resembles North-German Baroque organs, and has a closed-circuit television monitor set into the music desk.

[24][25] The concert hall houses Ray Garica's Astrid with collaborations with levy restaurants which offer other dining options throughout The Music Center complex.