Seeing Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao for the first time was an almost visceral thrill. It certainly lived up to the promise of that early Basel building, the little Vitra Museum. At the time, I remember crossing my fingers as I wrote that Gehry, on the evidence of Vitra, was set to become as famous as Richard Rogers or James Stirling. How wrong I was - when Bilbao came along, he eclipsed them both with ease. He insouciantly achieved greatness. But the Gehry effect wears off. He cannot trump himself all the time. So I was a bit bored by Disney Hall (which was designed before Bilbao, was chronically delayed, and looks it). And when someone stuck a microphone in my face on opening night and asked me what I thought, I could only say there were other Gehry buildings, not to mention other non-Gehry buildings, that I liked better. This was not in the script. A certain amount of consternation, not to mention a touch of froideur, resulted. And I was off down the road to look at the new cathedral.

What interested me was not so much Disney Hall as what Disney Hall represents in the continually-evolving history of Los Angeles. The trouble with LA, as Gertrude Stein remarked of Oakland, is that when you get there, there isn't any "there" there. LA is a loose assemblage of regional settlements linked by a skein of freeways. It resembles a big bowl of seafood tagliatelle. Everybody knows this from a million films. It is a city that can be sunny Beach Boys optimistic, or all Blade Runner doomy. Last week, it was a touch of both: bright, happy-feeling, but with the buses and trains on strike and the smoke of surrounding bush fires starting to blot out the sun. Just a bit pre-apocalyptic, in fact. But the now clichéd metallic Gehry billows and peaks at Disney Hall are meant, as Angelinos see it, to represent a different kind of future: a rather old-fashioned, European city-centre kind of future. If this is true, then it goes against everything that LA is most famous for urbanistically: sprawl.