The Beckmen YOLA Center is the product of Gehry Partners and Miyamoto International’s work to transform a mid-century bank building into the first permanent, purpose-built facility for the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles. The Center provides learning and teaching opportunities to aspiring musicians and educators in a space designed to showcase the structure’s openness, with its 45-foot-ceiling performance hall and a movable acoustic wall that can divide rooms, and to recall the structure’s past—its glassy exterior echoes the bank’s boxy silhouette, and the original structure’s street-facing columns add a sense of understatement and symmetry. The main space accommodates a sitting audience of 190, while in its surroundings, a series of smaller rooms provide additional community services, such as individual practice studios, a family lounge and the YOLA music library. Our engineers designed the building based on the ASCE Standard 41-13, which allowed us to maximize the use of the existing structure in the design of a new, code-conforming seismic system.