Hopes German music hall will hit the right notes
HAMBURG: The city of Brahms and Mendelssohn is enhancing its cultural charm with a new concert hall that will soar above the Elbe River like a ghostly glass-sailed schooner.
The futuristic concert hall, designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, will tower 360 feet above the city's harbor. City officials hope it will rival the shell-shaped Sydney Opera House in Australia as a landmark recognized around the globe.
The philharmonic complex to feature concerts in classical music, as well as jazz, rock, pop and world music will stand on top of an old coffee warehouse, located on a spit of land that juts into the Elbe at one end of Hamburg's busy harbor.
The North German Radio Symphony Orchestra, currently led by conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi, will be the resident orchestra.
The project is part of ongoing efforts to redevelop the city's old docklands known as Hafencity, or Harbor City as a center of homes, offices and cultural events. The city has worked on improving the area's tourist infrastructure and already has a cruise ship terminal that spills travelers directly into the historic district.
Work on the 155-hectare Hafencity neighborhood started six years ago, with plans including the construction of 5,500 apartments and dozens of office buildings by 2025. In recent weeks, the city also started building a new subway line to connect the former docklands with the rest of Hamburg, where composers Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn were born.
"We're excited about the whole new image our city will soon have," Hamburg Tourist Board spokeswoman Gisele Mollat said. "Most people think that ports are dirty and smelly, so they'll be thrilled to find out that Hamburg's harbor and the Hafencity are so modern and tourist-friendly."
Hamburg Mayor Ole von Beust laid the Elbe Philharmonic Hall's foundation stone last week, and said he expected it to raise the profile of Germany's second-biggest city.
"We are strengthening Hamburg as a metropolis, at home and abroad," he said.
Based on plans by Herzog and de Meuron who transformed a former power station into London's Tate Modern art museum the euro241 million ($322 million) building should be completed in 2010.
The roofline will be wave-shaped, and the bent glass facades will be covered with a grid of white dots to provide protection from the sun. The jagged front and sides form a boxy "V" shape, resembling the hull and sails of the Flying Dutchman's spectral ship.
The complex will feature two concert halls one with 2,150 seats and one with 550 as well as a 220-room luxury hotel, bars and restaurants, a day spa, 45 luxury apartments and a viewing platform.
The project is just the latest effort in shedding the harbor area's gritty past, a past marked by seedy bars and the St. Pauli red-light district that once drew crowds of sailors. The area's bars and nightclubs are increasingly frequented by tourists.
A 1966 warehouse that stocked coffee, cocoa and tobacco until it was vacated in the 1990s will be transformed into a 570-space parking structure. It will also house a music education center with a third, smaller concert hall.
Backers of the new building said they hope it will be one of the world's 10 best concert halls, or as the mayor said last week, "an impressive new face and new landmark of the city."
Agencies
(China Daily 04/13/2007 page19)
