The Berliner Philharmonie

Monday, 16 May 2016 - 11:00 am (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination:
Category/Kategorie: General, Architecture, Berlin, Opera Houses, Theaters, Libraries
Reading Time:  3 minutes

Kammermusiksaal © Jorge Franganillo/cc-by-sa-4.0

Kammermusiksaal © Jorge Franganillo/cc-by-sa-4.0

The Berliner Philharmonie is a concert hall in Berlin. Home to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the building is acclaimed for both its acoustics and its architecture. Actually a two-venue facility with connecting lobby, the Philharmonie comprises a Großer Saal of 2,440 seats for orchestral concerts and a chamber-music hall, the Kammermusiksaal, of 1,180 seats. Though conceived together, the smaller venue was added only in the 1980s.

The Philharmonie lies on the south edge of the city’s Tiergarten and just west of the former Berlin Wall, an area that for decades suffered from isolation and drabness but that today offers ideal centrality, greenness, and accessibility. Its cross street and postal address is Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, named for the orchestra’s longest-serving principal conductor. The neighborhood, often dubbed the Kulturforum, can be reached on foot from the Potsdamer Platz station.

Kammermusiksaal © Manfred Brückels/cc-by-sa-3.0 Kammermusiksaal © Jorge Franganillo/cc-by-sa-4.0 Berliner Philharmonie © Manfred Brückels/cc-by-sa-3.0 Berliner Philharmonie and Kammermusiksaal © Raimond Spekking/cc-by-sa-3.0 Entrance of Berliner Philharmonie © Kazuyanagae/cc-by-sa-4.0
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Berliner Philharmonie and Kammermusiksaal © Raimond Spekking/cc-by-sa-3.0
Hans Scharoun designed the hall, which was constructed over the years 1960–1963 (open on October 15th, 1963 Concert Beethoven Symphony No.9 Herbert von Karajan cond. BPO). It was built to replace the old Philharmonie, destroyed by British bombers on 30 January 1944.

The hall is a singular building, asymmetrical and tentlike, with the main concert hall in the shape of a pentagon. The seating offers excellent positions from which to view the stage through the irregularly increasing height of the seat rows. The stage is at the center of the hall, with seats surrounding it on all sides. The Philharmonie is highly regarded for the quality of its acoustics. The so-called vineyard-style seating arrangement (with terraces rising around a central orchestral platform) was pioneered by this building, and became a model for other concert halls, including the Sydney Opera House (1973), Denver‘s Boettcher Concert Hall (1978), the Gewandhaus in Leipzig (1981), Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003), and the Philharmonie de Paris (2014).
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Read more on Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Wikipedia Berliner Philharmonie (Smart Traveler App by U.S. Department of State - Weather report by weather.com - Global Passport Power Rank - Travel Risk Map - Democracy Index - GDP according to IMF, UN, and World Bank - Global Competitiveness Report - Corruption Perceptions Index - Press Freedom Index - World Justice Project - Rule of Law Index - UN Human Development Index - Global Peace Index - Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index). Photos by Wikimedia Commons. If you have a suggestion, critique, review or comment to this blog entry, we are looking forward to receive your e-mail at comment@wingsch.net. Please name the headline of the blog post to which your e-mail refers to in the subject line.






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