Good Vibrations: new concert halls

Light is often cited as the ultimate intangible architectural element, with its ability to create form, volume and texture.

But the way we perceive the built environment isn’t limited to the gaze. It’s a multisensory experience. The aural as much as the visual shapes the way we encounter, navigate and draw pleasure (or displeasure) from the spaces we continually move through.

Against the backdrop of a, somewhat belated, increase in the awareness and practice of acoustic planning in architecture, the non plus ultra of building types where sound takes centre stage has been given fresh creative expression by a number of architects internationally. The concert hall, whose very raison d’etre is the optimised conveyance and consumption of sound, is undergoing a renaissance, with recently completed projects – from the landmark to the limited-budget – marrying performance space with high-performance acoustics.

A decade under construction due to a series of setbacks, Herzog & de Meuron’s long-awaited Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg is set to raise the architectural bar (or should that be baton), when it opens in 2017. In spite of its almost €800-million price tag, the project is anything but art for art’s sake, functioning at once as home to the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, a 250-room hotel, and a spectacular piece of place-making for the Hanseatic city’s regenerated docklands.

In contrast to the high drama of Hamburg’s new cultural venue, in terms of location, scale and genesis, Spanish office Barozzi Veiga’s Szczecin Philharmonic Hall drops an octave, articulated as it is as a series of concatenated, proudly gabled volumes, which read almost as a row of separate structures. The 1,000-seater Polish concert hall, as well as smaller space for chamber music, are accessed via a grand, highly graphic spiral staircase. The exterior, meanwhile, mitigates any sense of the monolithic further by embracing translucency; its backlit glass-ribbed facade glows gently at night.

Still in Poland and still with a Spanish architect, but from lightness to heaviness. An aggregate of crushed red brick and a concrete mix lend form to Fernando Menis’s interior for his CKK Jordanki concert hall in Torun, whose rough expression, in tandem with the auditorium’s angular planes, creates a subterranean atmosphere. Here, the aesthetic and the acoustic are in concert (during concerts), with the architect’s specially developed material technique – which he calls picado – providing optimal sound transmission.

There’s also something cavernous about Peter Haimerl Architektur’s 500-square-metre concert hall in the Bavarian village of Blaibach, Germany, with its stone-clad, monolithic exterior and stratified, concrete auditorium space. (Timber defines the transition, lining the corridor between the two.) The building’s interior, with its raked seating, informs its external, intriguingly upturned form, which at first reads as a structure partially subsided.

But head to Sion in Switzerland and you’ll find a concert venue that eschews stony permanence in favour of the ready-made. Savioz Fabrizzi Architectes have for their Le Port Franc music centre used old standardised shipping containers to create a centre for live music performance. An alternative building method for an alternative cultural scene. What’s more, due to the modular nature of its construction, the organisation of the spaces within the centre can be modified according to specific needs in terms of use and ambience. Let’s play it by ear.

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