E
Main-level plan: the main hall is in concert configuration, the chamber hall with audience on three sides of a small stage.
h = 2350
The foyers have a rich dynamic and sense of movement that belies the austerity of their materials, and also give intriguing internal and external views
Cross-section through the main auditorium.
The interior makes some of these conditions more explicit. The entrance foyer is a dramatic, multilevel space, itself proof that concrete may be austere but is not necessarily forbidding. However, it is the angles, routes and views across the space and out of the building that make it really memorable. Moving from the entrance to either of the performance spaces affords all sorts of opportunities to look backwards at selective views of the city. Similarly, the journey from the auditoria back to the ground level reintroduces the physicality of architecture after the ephemera of performance, and what connects them is not a didactically determined system but individuals’ perceptions and impressions, and how those of the building and performance might merge. Cristina Iglesias’ Ligeti Benches capture these qualities in microcosm. Simple in form, they are coloured in strips of varying width, translating the chromatic and dissonant possibilities of music into visual terms. Like the building they mix functional possibilities with the promise of intellectual challenge. The two auditoria are themselves magnificent spaces. The larger, seating 1,300, manages the difficult task of being adaptable to symphonic concerts or opera performances. The stage can change its configuration, opening to reveal an orchestra pit for opera, or coming forward into the auditorium with the backstage shut off for orchestral concerts. Robbrecht wanted to incline the two side walls inwards towards the top to give the sense of a protective enclosure to the back and top of the auditorium. Happily, this intuitive idea coincided with acoustic theory, which needs hard surfaces closer to seats the further they are from the stage to reinforce direct sound with first reflected sound. As well as working functionally, here the physical form responds to a psychological condition – it seems to define a protective cocoon where individual members of the audience can have their own experience of living and viewing performance. Comfort in this context does not need the opulence so favoured in 19th-century auditoria like the Opera Garnier in Paris or Vienna’s Musikverein. And its
108+