mUNICH KONZERTSAAL
 

Hall for the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
 

Munich, Germany
 

Date:
Advanced Studio: Gehry
Spring 2016

Critics: 
Frank Gehry, Craig Webb, Meagan Lloyd, & Trattie Davies

The world of music performance presents a whole new universe of emotions, feelings and relationships. A concert hall is as much an instrument as the instruments that make up an orchestra. But, above all music is about relationships, and a hall’s emotion can not only facilitate that relationship; between performer to audience, between performers themselves (psycho-acoustics), and most importantly it can enhance the multitude of relationships involved in making the singular vortex of the performance into an amplitude level of euphoric high. 

In contemporary music, experimentation on music performance from Pierre Boulez’s Repons to Simon Rattle and Peter Sellar’s rendition of St’Matthew’s Passion has led the evolution of single orbital performances to multiply, creating dynamic pulses of musical orbits within the greater performance.

The concave resolution of the hall is coupled with studies in convex roof structure with the goal of achieving a ethereal experience within the hall. 

The Hall itself follows the rough dimensions of the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. It was imagined as a single surface that swirls down on to the stage continuously. As such, there are no balconies which disengages the audience and performers on stage. An audience at the top most terrace may traverse down on to the stage freely with no physical obstruction. 

Seatings marked red are conceived as flexible seatings where the hall may be configured freely through hydraulics to suit a contemporarily coreographed performance 

Total Seat count: 1800 Seats.

Hall is composed of a singular surface. Lines and terraces intersect and spiral around and into one another creating an integrative wine-yard layout, enhancing the performance through inter-audience visual interactions

The site itself is located in a post industrial peculiar new development that had been home to a historic potato factory facility and discotheques. While it is still making a mark on the Munich landscape, its geography presents itself as a center within the greater orbits of the Munich arts scene. 

A major site proposal was to reshuffle the proposed plans around the alotted site, and expand the site boundary to pull the flux of people from all corridors of the neighborhood, enabling the creation of mini side orbits outside of the hall itself as the main site strategy. 

By offsetting the hall right in the center of the site, audiences from all entry corridors are forced to engage with the building to pass through the site, openning the orchestra physically to the greater sphere of visitors and landscape beyond the hall itself.