Digitally sailing through Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall

Amsterdam-based digital experience agency Resn co-created this amazingly smooth digital exhibition with Getty - a leading global arts organisation committed to exhibiting, conserving and understanding the world’s artistic and cultural heritage. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, designed by the world-renowned architect Frank Gehry. Giving the public a rare behind-the-scenes view of Frank Gehry's architectural innovation and creativity. Showcasing the architectural design journey and creative process right from the start. Our Dutch Digital Design curators loved it all, especially its digital smoothness.

A co-creation by Getty and Resn

Getty was not so much a client as the originator and driving force behind the project. They acquired the Frank O. Gehry Papers in 2017, when they began digitising the collection. Since 2021 Getty have worked with Frank Gehry and his collaborators to document the design process of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. During this time they interviewed Gehry and his studio partners, as well as Nagata Acoustics - Japan’s leading acoustical consulting firm involved in the design of the concert hall - and the LA Philharmonic. In 2023, Resn joined the project to collaborate on an online interactive experience through which the public could engage with the work.

Getty wanted to transform its research and materials into a captivating, interactive deep dive for a broad digital public. To achieve this, Getty approached Resn to co-create this interactive exhibition.

The target audience

Sculpting Harmony is aimed at two distinct audiences, bridging the gap between creator and audience, enhancing appreciation and engagement. The first is a broad public audience with a general interest in the subject of architecture. The second is a more scholarly audience with an academic interest in the history and design of the building. 

Behind the scenes

Resn was brought into the project to design an interactive exhibition. This needed to reflect the thinking and design process behind this world-famous piece of architecture, and be able to feature nearly 200 objects from Getty's archive of Frank Gehry's collection, as well as offering a superior user experience and a high level of design thinking.

The goal was to reconstruct the evolution of the concert hall using digital storytelling techniques and multimedia elements. Getty had studied the materials for years, imaging and 3D modelling the archive, and interviewing Frank Gehry about how the pieces fit together. This became the base of this digital narrative. 

Resn combined these elements as a way to explore Gehry’s vision and creative process. To capture Gehry’s trademark style, his freeform sketches were incorporated into the design. The dynamic typography aimed to evoke the unique shapes of the concert hall, the sounds of the orchestra and Gehry’s playful personality.

Resn's digital storytelling techniques

The project uses Resn's proprietary framework as its foundation. The base architecture is built on Nuxt - adding extra features and conventions to streamline the development process - and VueJs - a JavaScript framework for building user interfaces. With the addition of Storyblok CMS for content management - a user-friendly and powerful headless CMS.

The dynamic animations throughout use GSAP’s timeline animation. Resn paired this with the scroll trigger feature to control the flow and progression of the animations. For the title animations, they used a blend of SVG components and GSAP's Scroll Trigger. This stretches and contracts the vertical scale in proportion to the scroll position to achieve a seamless and fluid motion. 

Three.js was used to create animated 3D computer graphics from Getty's exquisite scanned photogrammetry* models. These models provide an authentic depiction of Frank Gehry's concepts, represented through detailed scaled replicas.

*the technique of taking multiple overlapping photographs and deriving measurements from them to create 3D models of objects or scenes.

Loved by our Dutch Digital Design curators

High praise all around from our curators. For them, it is a site where it all comes together: UX, UI, 3D, motion, typography, sound, visual content and copy. A memorable piece of digital storytelling in every aspect!

Superb. In every way, can't really think of anything that isn't done right here. Love the interactions, the content, the combination of discovery and clarity. Love the design. Feels surprising and original.
Kamiel Meijers - Dutch Digital Design curator & co-founder and creative director 51North

Scroll animations are next level.
Mees Rutten - Dutch Digital Design curator & co-founder and creative developer Merlin Studio

Awards & mentions

• Communication Arts Interactive Competition - Best-In-Show Art/Design 
• Communication Arts Webpicks 
• Awwwards Site Of The Month 
• Awwwards Site Of The Day 
• FWA Of The Month 
• FWA Of The Day