Elbe Philharmonic Hall

Music, at once otherworldly and arrestingly present, presents a unique challenge to architects called upon to house it. Herzog & de Meuron rise to the challenge with the Elbe Philharmonic Hall, an ethereal monument to musical form.

All art, argued Walter Pater, constantly aspires towards the condition of music – by which he means the seamless conjunction of form and content, music’s elegant ability to mean only what it is. Designing a space for such an art form is a perilous balancing act. It demands both aesthetics and acoustics, the twin compulsions of pure form on the one hand and perfect sound on the other. It provides the spatial dimension of musics temporal form and the visual dimension of its aural art. At the same time, it defines the acoustic shape of the music, determining the contours, the richness and the quality of the sound. It is not enough, in other words, for architecture to follow art in aspiring to the condition of music – concert hall architecture must also bow to music in accommodating its unique requirements.

But there are many ways of taking such a mandate. Architecture can, of course, bow to music by disappearing, becoming a blank screen on which the acoustic elements are projected. The alternative – more ambitious and more risky – is to design a building that becomes part of the event, not merely accommodating it but enlivening it, playing in harmony with the performances it houses. Herzog & de Meuron's Elbe Philharmonic Hall, in Hamburg's portside redevelopment HafenCity, aspires to the latter. Sweeping and magisterial, it declares that the concert hall is the event.

It does so, not by eclipsing or ignoring the music, but by standing as a permanent monument to the transient concert. The Elbe Philharmonic Hall is built around a series of abstract formal gestures, analogous but not identical to musical abstraction. Herzog & de Meuron began with an abandoned warehouse, known as Kaispeicher A, a post-war design by Werner Kallmorgen. Kaispeicher A presents a towering monolithic façade, punctuated by a grid of 50 x 75cm windows. Unlike the surrounding warehouses, the building is radically abstract, an imposing but cleanly modernist monument.

The heavy, abstract façade of the warehouse will become the base for a new building perched atop it. Leaping off into an ethereal fantasy, the new building is crystalline and tentlike, playing in counterpoint to the warehouse. Where the warehouse will mostly be used for parking, this elaborate structure incorporates concert halls, restaurants, bars, apartments and a luxury hotel. The golden concert hall shadows the glass façade, an elusive trace of the building's cultural function. Away from the hall at the centre, the façade is textured by openings that accommodate balconies set back into the surface. Sumptuous and otherworldly, it appears as a dream-version of the warehouse below, an airy response to its deeper bassline.

Visitors enter via a sweeping escalator that ascends from street level and up through the warehouse, slowly revealing stunning views of the harbour. They emerge onto the plaza, at the junction of the warehouse and the new building. The roof of the plaza – the underside of the new building – curves down around the visitors and lifts in places to reveal views over the port and city skyline. As it bends and dips, the juncture traces out a spatial melody, a clear and oscillating line around which the public moves and coalesces.

From the plaza a set of sweeping stairs lead further into the crystalline structure opening onto the lobby of the concert hall. The rich, shining interior unfolds vertically across three storeys, all visible to each other through a series of central stairwells. The shapes are organic and asymmetrical, creating a sense of dynamism that is heightened by the movement of concert-goers through the lobby. Both people and place seem to reverberate, moving and repeating through the lobby with subtle variations. The lobby opens on to the buildings two main venues: a concert hall seating 2100 and a chamber music hall seating 550.

The design of the main concert hall has been heavily influenced by Hans Scharoun's revolutionary 1963 Berlin Philharmonic. As in Scharoun's design, the orchestra at the Elbe Philharmonic Hall sits in the centre of the hall, surrounded on all sides by the audience. Spectators look down at the orchestra, as the music rises up through the hall. The contours of the hall are shaped, then, by both the configuration of the audience and the imagined strains of the concert. Immediately above the orchestra, a spectacular reflector is suspended from the ceiling, an integral part of both the lighting and acoustic systems and an elegant architectural response to the orchestral pit below.

Here, at the core of the Elbe Philharmonic Hall and at the site of the musical event, orchestra and audience feed off one another, bound together in the production of the orchestral moment. It's a moment whose success cannot be judged until 2011, when the Philharmonic is due for completion. Renderings can speak to the aesthetics, but the acoustics – which aspire to the remarkable success of Scharoun's design – will remain purely theoretical until then. Preliminary indications, however, promise a building that draws on musics formal play without disappearing into pure speculation: like its façade, a fantasy-structure grounded in the weighty realities of logistics and commerce. +

1 Herzog & de Meuron's Elbe Philharmonic Hall balances a new glass structure atop the heavy warehouse facade of kaispeicher A. Visitors enter through the warehouse at ground level, before being carried to a plaza at the juncture of old and new new structures. 2 Protruding into the harbour, the Elbe Philharmonic Hall's sweeing superstructure references the water below, while a panoramic window in the warehouse offers views of the harbour as visitors ascend on an escalator. 3 In the main concert hall, the audience surround the orchestra on all sides. A reflector hangs from the ceiling, aiding lighting and acoustics. 4 The plaza's dramatic roof structure dramatises the juncture of the two buildings, while sweeping staircases provide a theatrical entrance to the lobby of the concert hall above. 5 The plaza, conceived as an open public space, offers spectacular panoramas of hamburg's city centre, HafenCity, and the harbour.

IMAGES courtesy and copyright of Herzog & de Meuron