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posted by on Tuesday May 23 2017, @09:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-has-character dept.

The Elbphilharmonie, a concert hall in Hamburg encased in glass and set upon a giant brick warehouse, is surrounded on three sides by the waters of the city’s bustling harbor. Designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron, the building cost about $850 million, took more than a decade to design and build, and was for a long time cited as a joke — a dark joke — among Germans who fretted that the project had become an albatross: unbuildable, over budget, and wildly out of proportion to what the sensible people of this mercantile city wanted or needed.

But the building, one of several projects around the world that aim self-consciously for “iconic” status and have price tags in the billion-dollar range, opened to international acclaim on Jan. 11. The acoustics, designed by the renowned Japanese acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, are a marvel of clarity, precision and cool objectivity. Visitors enjoy stunning views of the industrial grit of Hamburg, renewing the city’s relation to the source of its wealth and its cultural window on the larger world. Tourists flock to ascend the Elphie’s long escalator, rising through the old warehouse in a tunnel of white glass and plaster to visit the rooftop terrace, which bustles with activity before and long after evening concerts. If you want to attend a concert, good luck, because almost everything is sold out.

[...] Why this building? What about its design, its location and the implicit social messages embedded in its architecture have made it so successful? Carsten Brosda, a senator in Hamburg’s state government and head of its cultural authority, says location is a primary factor in its success. “I was never a fan of iconic buildings because so many of them are rather generic,” he says. But Elbphilharmonie is exceptional, located in the geographical heart of the city, on a site that demanded some exceptional public use. “There were architects saying this is on the verge of being unbuildable, but that is what makes it unique.”

The care taken with the acoustics are another factor. Toyota doesn’t try to replicate the sumptuous warmth of 19th-century concert halls. Rather, he aims for a live- ­performance sound adapted to the digital age, which reinforces pleasures lost to an era of cheap headphones and limited-range MP3 files. There is no golden aura, but there is fantastic clarity and spatial presence. Part of that success, at the Elbphilharmonie, may be attributable to what people here call the “white skin,” an interior surface of 10,000 unique gypsum-fiber panels that help diffuse sound.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 23 2017, @11:11PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday May 23 2017, @11:11PM (#514564)

    Some people with lots of money will probably rent the place for special events, and help improve the bottom line.
    2100 is the main room, but there has to be a few other ones.

    At least, there is public transportation to get people in and out and in and out of the penis-shaped pier...
    (See also the Channel Islands Harbor [google.com] for another great example of phallic port)

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