Elbphilharmonie

Judged on purpose, structure and site. The Grand Hall passes the subtractive test: the stage at the centre, the steep terraces close to it, the milled cells of its lining, the reflector, the volume of the room and its separation from the noise of the port are each required by hearing an orchestra in a harbour. The section compels much of the rest. A hall set over a full warehouse block must be reached by a long rise, so the escalator is required; the seam between brick and glass is where the public terrace must fall; the glass body takes its height from the hall inside it. What yields is the programme around the core: the hotel, the apartments and the parking are financing permitted by the section, not compelled by it. Remove the apartments and the work loses rent, not meaning. The roof’s wave follows the volumes beneath only loosely, and the glass is in places an image laid round rooms. The cap is cleared by a tenth.

Score: 7.6 / 10

What it brings into the open can be stated. A port city’s culture stands on its trade, literally: the warehouse that held cocoa, tea and tobacco for Hamburg’s merchants is the plinth of its civic room, and the visitor passes through the store to reach the music. A concert house can be a public square before it is a hall: the Plaza is open to anyone without a ticket, and it shows the city to itself, cranes, river, roofs and churches, from a height only the building gives. And the vineyard room restates that music can be heard as a gathering round a centre rather than a seating by rank. What holds the axis: the third truth is Scharoun’s, received; the second is close to Utzon’s platform, raised into the air; and much of what the glass gives is mood, shimmer and the river’s light, which ranks below a meaning. The scandal of its cost discloses, lightly, a city’s will over its budget.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Elevation is high and frequent, and it comes in stages. It comes first in the ascent: the escalator, white and studded with small reflective discs, curving so that its end is hidden, a slow rise through the warehouse toward a window of light. It comes on the Plaza, where the port opens on every side, ships passing below, the city behind, the glass overhead bellied and cut into mouths. It comes in the Grand Hall at its height: the terraces climb steeply, the audience hangs over the stage on every side, the pale cellular walls read as something grown rather than built, and the room has the vertigo of a crater. And it comes from the river, where the glass crown floats above the brick and takes the colour of water and sky. What holds the axis: the register is exhilaration and wonder, rarely awe; the foyer stairs are tight and repetitive; the hotel and the flats give nothing to the height.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The archetype is built, in part, into the section: an ascent from the waterline through the earth into light, then inward to the cave at the heart. The visitor enters at the foot of a mass of brick, rises through a long tube that hides its end, comes out on a threshold in the air with the world spread below, and climbs again into the hall, a hollow at the summit of the crystal, a grotto on a mountain. Earth below and crystal above, heavy and light, old store and new crown: Utzon’s platform and floating roof turned vertical and set on a monument of trade. The procession is walked by every visitor, and it is load-bearing for experience, not allusion. What holds the axis: the ship, the wave, the iceberg, the tent and the crown are readings the glass invites and does not construct; the gathering round a centre is received from the vineyard type; and the archetype ends at the hall, while the hotel and the flats stand outside it.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance: the vineyard hall from Scharoun’s Philharmonie in Berlin (1963) through Suntory Hall to Toyota’s rooms in Los Angeles and Paris; the cultural building as civic emblem after Sydney and Bilbao; the conversion of industrial fabric, which the architects had made their own at Tate Modern (2000); new mass set on an old shell, as at Foster’s Hearst Tower and the firm’s CaixaForum in Madrid. The departure: a concert hall raised some fifty metres over the water on top of a warehouse block, with a public square in the air at the seam and a vertical town of hall, hotel and housing in one glass body. The stake was paid in full: a construction stopped for more than a year, a cost that rose many times over, an inquiry, and the credibility of the city and of the firm. What holds the axis: by 2003 the emblem building was a proven path, and each part of the swerve had a precedent. The departure is in their combination and their height.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Would a different form change what the building knows? In most of what matters, yes. Put the hall on the ground and concert-going loses the ascent through the store, the pause on the Plaza above the port, and the sense of hearing music at the top of the city’s oldest trade. The Plaza turns a ticketed institution into a public place used every day by people who never enter the hall. In the Grand Hall the form is the instrument: no seat far from the stage, the steep terraces making the audience visible to itself and close to the players, the milled lining shaping a sound heard as clear and close, sometimes unforgiving. What holds the axis: the room’s knowledge belongs mostly to the vineyard type; the hotel, the flats and the parking are contained, not formed; and the warehouse below is a brick mask over car parks, its form kept as image while its interior is replaced.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Evidence over promise, and the record is under ten years: that is what holds this axis lowest of the twelve. The building has been read already in several ways: as the case of parametric design carried to fabrication, in the White Skin and the glass; as a model and a warning of public procurement, cited beside Berlin’s airport and Stuttgart 21 in the German argument over large projects; as acoustics, in a debate over whether a room so clear is too exposing; as the emblem of HafenCity, and a test of whether an icon makes a district; as conversion, the warehouse kept as plinth and mask. The object yields more on return than its image suggests: the Plaza’s changing views, the variety of the glass, the route of the escalator. But most of the questions concern its making and its city rather than what its form means, the record is short, and much of what is said is said of the photograph.

Score: 7.1 / 10

Field: the concert hall and the European civic building of the early twenty-first century. Intrinsic force is real. The building joined the vineyard room to a vertical mixed-use town on an industrial block and made the seam a public square in the air; and in the White Skin it showed an acoustic surface designed and milled panel by panel at the scale of a whole hall, a step beyond the timber reflectors of earlier rooms. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide as an emblem, short as a demonstrated redirection. It became Hamburg’s figure at once, and concert and cultural buildings since have cited it; but under ten years cannot show a line of buildings descending from it, and its loudest effect in Germany has been as a cautionary tale of cost. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. It is a summit of the turn begun at Sydney and Bilbao more than the turn itself.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over nine years and nine months. The form is whole: warehouse, Plaza, glass, roof and halls stand as built, with no later change of consequence. The use has been continuous and intense since January 2017: concerts in both halls, a public Plaza visited in great numbers, a hotel and homes occupied, interrupted only by the pandemic, which closed every hall. The fabric has held on a marine site, though the printed glass and the roof’s surfaces are untested by decades of salt and weather. The warehouse’s brick has stood some sixty years, but it survives as the plinth of this work, its first use gone and its interior replaced. Its presence is among the widest of any recent building, and presence earns little here. What holds the axis is age: the survival shown is short, and the surface is tied to a moment of glass and computed form that it has not yet outlived.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making is load-bearing in the hall: a room of about 2,100 seats set high in a glass body, separated from the structure against the horns and engines of the port, lined in panels each milled to its place for diffusion, with a sound praised from the opening for its clarity. The glass envelope is a large feat of curved and printed glazing, the bent openings at the loggias made in glass, not in frame. The escalator, the Plaza’s vaulted soffits and the load set on a 1960s warehouse on the soft ground of the Elbe are carried with command. The costs are charged: a roof that had to be reworked in mid-construction; a hall whose acoustics have divided some performers and listeners; tight foyers and stairs; the brick shell kept as a face over garages; and hotel interiors that are ordinary work.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Kallmorgen’s brick wall at the waterline, orthogonal, heavy, punched with small openings, and the lining of the Grand Hall, pale, cellular, grown rather than built. They obey one law only as a law of contrast: heavy below and light above, found below and made above, an earth under a crystal with a cave at the crystal’s heart. That law is held consistently. The Plaza’s curved soffits begin the transition; the glass’s cut mouths and bellies answer the hall’s terraces and the roof’s waves; the escalator’s curve and the hall’s crater share a language of the hollowed and the rounded. What bends it: the warehouse is a found object governed by its own builder’s law, kept as a mask over a new interior; the hotel and the flats live in the glass under a third, ordinary law; and the joint between the halves is a style of juxtaposition more than one physics.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Orders held: trade and labour, in a warehouse of a port’s merchants, the goods that filled it and the cars that fill it now; the river, the tide and the sea, in the site at the point and the ships that pass below; the city, shown to itself from the Plaza and given a figure on its skyline; the civic public, on the open terrace; music and its community, at the core; dwelling and travel, in the flats and the hotel within the same body; the state and its money, in a public commission, its overrun and its inquiry; and history, in a warehouse built on the site of one lost in the war. The section integrates several: storage below, the public at the seam, music at the heart, homes at the crown. What holds the axis: the dwelling and the hotel are stacked more than held; the sacred, the family and the individual consciousness are absent; and the war and the port’s history are present as fabric, not made to speak.

Score: 7.3 / 10