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 On October 31 construction work on the Hamburg Elbphilarmonie concert hall officially ended. The magnificent glass façade sits atop an abandoned warehouse on the river Elbe and is now the tallest inhabited building in Hamburg. The 2,039-seat hall will officially open in early January.
Despite its grandiose appearance, the Elbphi (as it’s popularly called) was something of a budgetary disaster. It took over nine years to build, six more than planned. While construction was initially estimated to cost €77 million in 2007, the final cost of €789 million was 10 times the original figure. The project was subject to some blistering media criticism and public scorn as a result of these setbacks.
Anyone well-versed in modern music hall construction would expect nothing less from such a project. Building a concert hall is characteristically expensive and time-consuming, often beginning with reasonable estimates that quickly spiral out of control. For example, the famed Sydney Opera House broke ground in 1959 and could have been finished as early as 1964 at a cost of $7 million Australian dollars. Due to a variety of setbacks, including weather, site drainage and miscommunication, the hall was opened in 1973 after construction costs ran to $102 million AUD, nearly a billion AUD in 2016. In Los Angeles, the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Hall took 12 years to build because of the need for a $110 million underground parking garage and stalled funding in the mid-1990s.
Why are concert halls so difficult and expensive? Many critics point to the demands levied by famous conductors and classical music impresarios; indeed, all three halls discussed so far are iconic, breathtaking spaces worthy of hosting great music (and huge egos). Others point to the often faulty economics of selling classical music: a hall must have enough seats to justify its cost, and perhaps be architecturally grandiose enough to attract people to fill them.
Taking a hall’s acoustics into account creates an interesting interplay between architecture and seating capacity. Most of the concert halls judged to sound the best—including Vienna’s Musikverein, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and the Birmingham (UK) Symphony Hall—incorporate a “shoebox” design in which their auditoriums are simple rectangles with the performing group stationed at one end. In a shoebox hall, the first sound perceived by a listener has reflected off either wall, so the sound heard in each ear is subtly different. Because the sound from each wall takes slightly longer to reach the far ear, the signal attenuates to bend around the head and gives the listener the impression of being enveloped with sound. One perceived drawback of shoeboxes is that listeners in the very back, farthest from the performers, experience a less satisfying aural and visual performance.
The alternate design pioneered in Berlin in 1963 is the “vineyard” hall in which the orchestra is effectively enveloped by their audience. This design is sort of the musical version of a theater in the round, with terraced groups of listeners spread throughout the space, including behind the orchestra. Vineyard halls have a few cool advantages, including the ability to see the conductor’s face from your seat behind the orchestra, but acoustics are not among them. To begin with, many instruments (including trombones, trumpets, clarinets and oboes) project their sound straight out from a bell or pipe. Those seated behind the ensemble would perceive much less of these instruments but much more of the horns, whose bells face backward. Most vineyard halls have angled walls, so they don’t experience the same enveloping reflections of shoebox types. To make matters worse, vineyard halls were originally conceived to increase the amount of seats (and tickets sold). Bodies and clothing act as natural dampers, so the larger the audience, the quieter and duller the sound.
A glance at London’s famous halls shows that designing an economically successful hall that sounds “good” has always been a difficult proposition. The famed Royal Albert Hall, which hosts the popular BBC Proms, is typically judged an acoustical failure due to its enormous, 5,000-seat size. (Granted, it was built in 1871, before acoustic design was a true science.) London’s Royal Festival Hall was built within a reasonable time and on-budget (18 months and for £2 million) using state-of-the-art acoustical figures in 1951, but the designers failed to take audience absorption into account, so it’s now judged as one of the driest—and worst-sounding—halls in Europe.
Sir Simon Rattle will become conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra next year, and it’s no surprise that he’s already lobbying for a brand new £100-200 million concert hall to replace the vineyard-style Barbican Centre. If he gets his wish it’s likely that the new building will be an architectural behemoth, hopefully with just enough seats to satisfy the orchestra and the audience.
Image credits: a as archictecture | Santa Fe University of Art and Design
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