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Below Visitors exploring the interior of Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie and admiring its design
Right An exterior view of the Elbphilharmonie that cost nearly one billion euros and took 16 years to build
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
By the time it opened, in 2017, 16 years after its conception, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg cost nearly one billion euros. Five years later, it seems to have been embraced by its culture- loving citizens, the controversies forgotten. Veronica Simpson indulges in some post- occupancy evaluation
OF THE MANY extraordinary things about the Elbphilharmonie concert hall by Herzog & de Meuron (H&dM) in Hamburg, the fact that it got built at all is perhaps the main one. It started with the dream of a Hamburg developer duo, who spotted the potential in a midrise 1960s redbrick warehouse and its position at the tip of a then-disused promontory within Hamburg’s extensive and still-active docks. It is pertinent here to flag what is different about Hamburg; compared with any other major port city in Europe, the working docks are still close to the city centre, its traffic and clusters of cranes visible from the houses, shops and offices of its residents that front the wide Elbe river. Tis is what made that prominent spot seem the perfect site to the developers – an arts and music- loving pair, trained as an architect and an art historian – on which to build the city a world- class concert hall. Te rationale was both to make up for the relatively modest provision for orchestral music in the city – certainly compared with any other form of music, such
as rock, jazz, musical theatre or church music, venues and audiences for which abound in Hamburg – and to create an iconic contemporary emblem for the city, and one that unites its industrial past with a glittering, culturally enriched future (as with the Tate Modern in London).
Fortunately for this duo, they were friendly with Tate Modern architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. In December 2001, over dinner, the architects doodled a whimsical, wave-like glass palace on top of this former cocoa and coffee bean warehouse – and the dream was born. With a few luxury apartments and a hotel to draw investment, and the city’s coffers tapped for the performance spaces, new music facilities and some public realm, the couple reckoned construction costs would come to around 95 million euros. Tey had some work to do to convince the Hamburg authorities and its people – who rejected the proposal first time around – but eventually the idea and the building caught the local and civic imagination with the promise of a cultural beacon at the heart of a new residential area. Two years after that initial sketch, the idea was approved.
Tirteen years and over 866 million euros later, the Elbphil, as it is colloquially known, is now celebrating its fifth birthday. Te remarkable struggle to bring this structure into existence has become part of its myth – it is even celebrated, with budgetary crises to boot, in a commemorative birthday publication. Te budget estimates were revised again and again, up to 187 million euros in 2005 and 241 million euros in 2006. By then, the developer couple had dropped out of the picture, and the
city of Hamburg was struggling to manage the competing demands of contractors Hochtief and the architects, as well as the unwelcome, expensive surprises this innovative building kept throwing up. First, the original warehouse structure proved to be unequal to the task of taking the weight of the proposed glass palace, so it had to be gutted with only the facades remaining. A whole new interior was constructed – mostly housing car parking – that could take the strain of supporting not just two acoustically isolated concert halls (you cannot have the honking of river traffic interrupting Beethoven’s Fifth, nor the percussion of timpanis disturbing the rest of the occupants of the 44 luxury apartments or the hotel), but also all of that glass. Te glass itself apparently took three attempts to get right – its jigsaw puzzle configurations, incorporating those smiling, curved elements (which include small, openable windows for
ALEXSNDRQ /
SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
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