Contemporary concert halls are no longer the stuffy cultural institutions of the past. Reaching out to new and diverse audiences, these buildings are turning themselves inside out, spilling out into the urban fabric. Fulfilling more functions than ever before, the concert halls featured in these videos — Harpa in Reykjavik, Wroclaw’s National Forum of Music and the Philharmonie de Paris — are at the forefront of new technologies and materials. In doing so, they are also redefining the architecture of performance and the musical experience.
In November 2017, PLANE—SITE was invited to contribute to the World Architecture Festival. Our response was to create a multimedia, interactive panel drawing on our ongoing research into concert halls — beginning with Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal in 2015. The resulting four films, outlined below, were created to highlight what we see as major themes in contemporary music architecture. First presented as part of a main-stage panel at the 2017 World Architecture Festival, these videos provided the jumping off point for an intriguing conversation between panelists, the WAF audience and the videos themselves. Panelists included Michel Cova of dUCKS scéno, Tateo Nakajima of Arup, and Jakob Kurek of Henning Larsen. The panel was moderated by Andres Ramirez of PLANE—SITE.
