Hamburg’s concert hall transforms city
TElbphilharmonie, 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 harbour. 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 among Germans who fretted that the project had become an albatross: unbuildable, over budget and out of proportion to what the people of this mercantile city wanted or needed.
But the building, one of several projects around the world which aim self-consciously for “iconic” status and have price tags in the billion-dollar range, opened to international acclaim on January 11. The acoustics, designed by the renowned Japanese acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, are a marvel of clarity, precision and objectivity. Visitors enjoy stunning views of the 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.
“Demand is overwhelming,” says Christoph Lieben-Seutter, general director of the Elbphilharmonie. Subscriptions for classical concerts have doubled since the hall opened, tour operators are pressuring the organisation to make more tickets available, and more than 1.5 million people have visited the public plaza since it opened last November.
In March, the Caracas-based Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra played all nine Beethoven symphonies at the new hall. At the end of the third movement from Symphony No5, where the first violins seem to get stuck dithering a scattered reminiscence of the main theme, there is one of the most famous crescendos in the history of music, a swelling and triumphant transition from darkness to light. The sound in the hall was so accurate that if you closed your eyes, you could point to exactly the spot where the timpani player was gently thumping his drums, and as the winds joined the strings.
Those eight bars could stand for the astonishing shift in public perceptions about the building, “from a scandal to a world wonder”, as LiebenSeutter puts it. Two decades after a Frank Gehry-designed outpost of the Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain, the idea that a building can transform a city isn’t held in high repute anymore. Debt and disillusion have made the “Bilbao effect” seem a hollow promise of a different age.
Here it is, back again, and it’s imperative to know why it is working. 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. “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.”
It is the architecture, the way it floats like a giant ship above the old brick factory, the drama of how one enters and moves through its spaces, and the way it situates people in relation to each other in the soaring auditorium, that makes this building extraordinary.
“Everybody was basically nuts about this,” Brosda says. The project is part of a major multibillion-dollar redevelopment of Hamburg’s harbour, converting 19th-century brick buildings and empty lots into residential, office and com- mercial space. But a concert hall atop an old factory was counterintuitive. The constrained and irregularly shaped floor plate of the warehouse meant that the auditorium, above, would be abnormally vertical in its layout.
Entry to the concert spaces – which include the 2,100seat main hall and a 572-seat recital hall – is accessed up a curving flight of wooden steps. When the building is open for performances, the visitor encounters no doors; the path up the steps leads directly into the lobby areas, which flow uninterrupted into the auditorium. The seating is in the round, or “vineyard” style, with the audience arrayed close to the stage in a set of shallow balconies.
Often, architects and critics stress the “democratic” or egalitarian virtues of vineyard-style seating, though the peculiar height of the Elbphilharmonie makes the lower seats, closest to the orchestra, more equal than others, especially the highest ones, which can inspire vertigo. It’s not a democratic seating plan with all seats being equal, but it is one that fosters an exciting sense of community during performances.
“This is a house for everybody,” says Ascan Mergenthaler, the senior partner at Herzog and de Meuron in charge of the project. But this was clearly a hall designed for, and intended to elevate (literally and symbolically), the experience of classical music. And that is remarkably refreshing.
It is also a magical place to hear music. The ride up its escalator creates a genuine sense of expectation and detaches one from the everyday world, mimicking the wide staircase and symbolic ascent of traditional concert hall architecture. During three concerts in March, the audience was scrupulously well behaved, attentive and enthusiastic. Even the signs marking the restrooms – which show a male figure in a tie and a female figure in a long, sleeveless evening gown – suggest how comfortable the Germans are with formality and elegance, which they don’t reflexively equate with hierarchy or privilege.